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"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/when-stranger-decides-destroy-your-life/",
"title": "When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill on what happens When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life. This is the story of a real estate agent named Monika Glennon who was the subject of a years-long harassment campaign after getting into a disagreement with a stranger on a local newspaper’s Facebook page: There is a constellation of sites on the internet that exist solely as places for people to exorcise their demons, and more importantly, their grudges; She’s A Homewrecker is one of them. It offers the opportunity to publicize a person’s misdeeds so that they are available not just to an inner circle with access to relevant gossip but to anyone who Googles that person’s name. The terms of service specify that posts must be factually true, but if they’re not, it’s not a problem for the site. It’s protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from being sued for the things their users say. […] Glennon wrote repeatedly to all the sites that had posted the story telling them it was false but none of them would take it down. Her only option was to go to court, so she filed a lawsuit in 2016 against John Does, alleging libel and copyright infringement, because the post used her professional headshot, which she had ownership of. Through the suit, Glennon was able to subpoena She’s A Homewrecker and Facebook for IP addresses, as well as Internet Service Providers to find out the identities of the people behind the IP addresses. A couple of months after she filed the suit, yet another post appeared on yet another site, “Report My Ex,” written by a man claiming to be the husband who had cheated with Glennon, again luridly detailing a sex act that never happened.Firstly, thank goodness for Facebook and its mission to connect the world more than ever before. I mean, in 1990, if you wanted to destroy a stranger’s life, you’d have to look them up in the phone book and then go make some flyers or something. Clearly, connecting more people together is an objectively benign goal, and nothing bad comes from this.Secondly, it’s remarkable that there’s a network of sites devoted to facilitating this kind of gossip. I’m struck by the fact that the most effective legal remedy people like Glennon have is a copyright claim. What if the harassers hadn’t used her headshot?",
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Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill on what happens When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life. This is the story of a real estate agent named Monika Glennon who was the subject of a years-long harassment campaign after getting into a disagreement with a stranger on a local newspaper’s Facebook page:

There is a constellation of sites on the internet that exist solely as places for people to exorcise their demons, and more importantly, their grudges; She’s A Homewrecker is one of them. It offers the opportunity to publicize a person’s misdeeds so that they are available not just to an inner circle with access to relevant gossip but to anyone who Googles that person’s name. The terms of service specify that posts must be factually true, but if they’re not, it’s not a problem for the site. It’s protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from being sued for the things their users say. […]

Glennon wrote repeatedly to all the sites that had posted the story telling them it was false but none of them would take it down. Her only option was to go to court, so she filed a lawsuit in 2016 against John Does, alleging libel and copyright infringement, because the post used her professional headshot, which she had ownership of.

Through the suit, Glennon was able to subpoena She’s A Homewrecker and Facebook for IP addresses, as well as Internet Service Providers to find out the identities of the people behind the IP addresses. A couple of months after she filed the suit, yet another post appeared on yet another site, “Report My Ex,” written by a man claiming to be the husband who had cheated with Glennon, again luridly detailing a sex act that never happened.

Firstly, thank goodness for Facebook and its mission to connect the world more than ever before. I mean, in 1990, if you wanted to destroy a stranger’s life, you’d have to look them up in the phone book and then go make some flyers or something. Clearly, connecting more people together is an objectively benign goal, and nothing bad comes from this.

Secondly, it’s remarkable that there’s a network of sites devoted to facilitating this kind of gossip. I’m struck by the fact that the most effective legal remedy people like Glennon have is a copyright claim. What if the harassers hadn’t used her headshot?

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/when-stranger-decides-destroy-your-life/",
"date_published": "2018-08-09T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-08-09T00:00:00-04:00",
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{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/mobilizing-feels/",
"title": "Mobilizing the Feels",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Friend of the blog James Grimmelmann on Emotional Mobilization (or Old Man Yells at Death…), which he starts by wondering whether the basic architecture of participatory democracy is broken beyond repair. The culprit isn’t necessarily Twitter or even mass media, but the forces that have learned how to get us to feel instead of think. As he puts it, “The way to build mass political power is to get something emotionally powerful and politically activating go viral among people who agree with you.” But this new mode of political engagement is profoundly exhausting. Keeping up with the news requires struggling through a firehose of attempts to activate your passions. They’re pretty effective attempts, too, since the people making them share your values, goals, and premises. They know how to hit you where it hurts, and you count on them to. People who you disagree with are activating too. Deliberately or not, they make you mad at their stupidity and immorality – and the people who agree with you are great at digging up and highlighting the things most likely to make you mad. Add another emotion: guilt. Every encounter with politics on social media makes me feel guilty if I sit it out: I’m not helping with a worthy cause. It makes me feel guilty if I join in: I’m degrading public discourse. And don’t even get me started on trying to post with nuance: I couldn’t tell you how often I’ve deleted a post because I expected to be yelled at or because I didn’t want to distract from useful yelling. We are living in a crisis. Hugely consequential things are being fought over and settled daily. The most important election of anyone’s lifetime is probably the one coming up in November. This is the time to act; this is the time when it matters most. But it has never hurt like this.I haphazardly danced around the periphery of this sentiment with my post on Lady Doritos earlier this year, but this puts the hammer firmly onto the flat part of the nail.",
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Friend of the blog James Grimmelmann on Emotional Mobilization (or Old Man Yells at Death…), which he starts by wondering whether the basic architecture of participatory democracy is broken beyond repair. The culprit isn’t necessarily Twitter or even mass media, but the forces that have learned how to get us to feel instead of think. As he puts it, “The way to build mass political power is to get something emotionally powerful and politically activating go viral among people who agree with you.”

But this new mode of political engagement is profoundly exhausting. Keeping up with the news requires struggling through a firehose of attempts to activate your passions. They’re pretty effective attempts, too, since the people making them share your values, goals, and premises. They know how to hit you where it hurts, and you count on them to. People who you disagree with are activating too. Deliberately or not, they make you mad at their stupidity and immorality – and the people who agree with you are great at digging up and highlighting the things most likely to make you mad.

Add another emotion: guilt. Every encounter with politics on social media makes me feel guilty if I sit it out: I’m not helping with a worthy cause. It makes me feel guilty if I join in: I’m degrading public discourse. And don’t even get me started on trying to post with nuance: I couldn’t tell you how often I’ve deleted a post because I expected to be yelled at or because I didn’t want to distract from useful yelling.

We are living in a crisis. Hugely consequential things are being fought over and settled daily. The most important election of anyone’s lifetime is probably the one coming up in November. This is the time to act; this is the time when it matters most. But it has never hurt like this.

I haphazardly danced around the periphery of this sentiment with my post on Lady Doritos earlier this year, but this puts the hammer firmly onto the flat part of the nail.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/mobilizing-feels/",
"date_published": "2018-08-05T00:00:00-04:00",
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{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/late-stage-capitalism-queer-eye/",
"title": "Late Stage Capitalism and Queer Eye",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "I can’t decide which is the best part of Laurie Penny’s endlessly quotable essay in The Baffler about Netflix’s Queer Eye series: Queer Eye is wonderful and terrible and probably the last significant statement to be made in reality television. The show, a Netflix-produced reboot of the original, squealsome mid-aughts judge-your-jeans extravaganza, instantly launched a thousand memes when it premiered in February, and the new second season has been a huger hit than anyone expected. In a culture awash in both mawkish reality vehicles dripping with kitsch and nostalgic reboots of shows from a softer world, Queer Eye is both. It manages to exceed the sum of its parts by not actually being about what we’re told it’s about. It’s not about queerness at all. It’s actually about the disaster of heterosexuality—and what, if anything, can be salvaged from its ruins. On the surface of things, it’s a straightforward quest for “acceptance,” supposedly of homosexuality, dramatized via the no-longer-so-outlandish vehicle of sending five gay men on an outreach mission to small-town Georgia with a vast interior design budget and a vanload of affirmations. What it turns out to be, though, is a forensic study of the rampaging crisis of American masculinity. In each new installment of the reboot, queerness is gently suggested as an antidote to the hot mess of toxic masculinity under late-stage capitalism.Name a more iconic duo than toxic masculinity and late-stage capitalism. I’ll wait, right over here while I watch billionaires self-fund humanity’s second space race.Oh right. Queer Eye: The gimmick is that heterosexuality is a disaster, toxic masculinity is killing the world, and there are ways out of it aside from fascism or festering away in a lonely bedroom until you are eaten by your starving pitbull or your own insecurities. The men typically featured as the show’s reclamation projects remind me of some of the men who I see on Tinder, sitting on that touring reproduction of the Iron Throne, staring into the middle distance, while in their real lives, and certainly on Queer Eye, they sit on ugly, painful furniture, faux-leather recliners that damage their backs, couches soaked in cat urine.Look, I have like seven paragraphs I marked to blockquote here, which might be a new record for “things that aren’t federal indictments.” I’m going to leave this last bit here and call it quits. There is a reason straight women love this show. It’s the pornography of emotional labor. There’s an old, bad joke where “porn for women” is supposed to involve soothing images of men doing the washing up and running around with a vacuum cleaner—the joke being, presumably, that women don’t like sex, and men don’t like cleaning, so our fantasies like theirs must also involve watching the so-called opposite sex pretend to enjoy something for our benefit. But let’s be clear: nobody is actually getting off on Queer Eye. In fact, the whole show is curiously unerotic, despite the constant on-screen presence of beautiful, charismatic men explicitly and relentlessly defined by their sexuality. The original series was far more explicit about making straight guys hotter—but the new series does exactly the same, from the inside out, there being nothing more off-putting than a man who can’t or won’t take basic care of himself, at least not for anyone who’s been down that particular road before.There’s little I love more in life than consuming some book or movie or (gasp!) episode of reality TV, taking away some kind of meaning from it, and then learning what I could have taken away from it by reading what people who are smarter than me took away from it. I can’t say enough good things about this essay.",
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Queer Eye is wonderful and terrible and probably the last significant statement to be made in reality television. The show, a Netflix-produced reboot of the original, squealsome mid-aughts judge-your-jeans extravaganza, instantly launched a thousand memes when it premiered in February, and the new second season has been a huger hit than anyone expected. In a culture awash in both mawkish reality vehicles dripping with kitsch and nostalgic reboots of shows from a softer world, Queer Eye is both. It manages to exceed the sum of its parts by not actually being about what we’re told it’s about. It’s not about queerness at all. It’s actually about the disaster of heterosexuality—and what, if anything, can be salvaged from its ruins.

On the surface of things, it’s a straightforward quest for “acceptance,” supposedly of homosexuality, dramatized via the no-longer-so-outlandish vehicle of sending five gay men on an outreach mission to small-town Georgia with a vast interior design budget and a vanload of affirmations. What it turns out to be, though, is a forensic study of the rampaging crisis of American masculinity. In each new installment of the reboot, queerness is gently suggested as an antidote to the hot mess of toxic masculinity under late-stage capitalism.

Name a more iconic duo than toxic masculinity and late-stage capitalism. I’ll wait, right over here while I watch billionaires self-fund humanity’s second space race.

Oh right. Queer Eye:

The gimmick is that heterosexuality is a disaster, toxic masculinity is killing the world, and there are ways out of it aside from fascism or festering away in a lonely bedroom until you are eaten by your starving pitbull or your own insecurities. The men typically featured as the show’s reclamation projects remind me of some of the men who I see on Tinder, sitting on that touring reproduction of the Iron Throne, staring into the middle distance, while in their real lives, and certainly on Queer Eye, they sit on ugly, painful furniture, faux-leather recliners that damage their backs, couches soaked in cat urine.

Look, I have like seven paragraphs I marked to blockquote here, which might be a new record for “things that aren’t federal indictments.” I’m going to leave this last bit here and call it quits.

There is a reason straight women love this show. It’s the pornography of emotional labor.

There’s an old, bad joke where “porn for women” is supposed to involve soothing images of men doing the washing up and running around with a vacuum cleaner—the joke being, presumably, that women don’t like sex, and men don’t like cleaning, so our fantasies like theirs must also involve watching the so-called opposite sex pretend to enjoy something for our benefit. But let’s be clear: nobody is actually getting off on Queer Eye. In fact, the whole show is curiously unerotic, despite the constant on-screen presence of beautiful, charismatic men explicitly and relentlessly defined by their sexuality. The original series was far more explicit about making straight guys hotter—but the new series does exactly the same, from the inside out, there being nothing more off-putting than a man who can’t or won’t take basic care of himself, at least not for anyone who’s been down that particular road before.

There’s little I love more in life than consuming some book or movie or (gasp!) episode of reality TV, taking away some kind of meaning from it, and then learning what I could have taken away from it by reading what people who are smarter than me took away from it. I can’t say enough good things about this essay.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/late-stage-capitalism-queer-eye/",
"date_published": "2018-08-02T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-08-02T00:00:00-04:00",
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{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/present-tense-interference/",
"title": "Present Tense Interference",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "FiveThirtyEight Oliver Roeder reviews a new academic paper from two professors at Clemson analyzing the tweets which were part of the Russian election interference. The findings are impressive, but I worry that real headline is buried at the end of the article: Russia’s attempts to distract, divide, and demoralize has been called a form of political war,” the authors conclude in their paper. “This analysis has given insight into the methods the IRA used to engage in this war.” This war may or may not have had an effect on the 2016 election, but it certainly wreaked havoc. The man who would be named national security adviser followed and pushed the message of Russian troll accounts, according to the Daily Beast, and Trump’s eldest son, campaign manager and digital director each retweeted a Russian troll in the month before the election. Twitter itself informed 1.4 million people that they’d interacted with Russian trolls. But the researchers emphasized that the Russian disinformation and discord campaign on Twitter extends well beyond even that. “There were more tweets in the year after the election than there were in the year before the election,” Warren said. “I want to shout this from the rooftops. This is not just an election thing. It’s a continuing intervention in the political conversation in America.”​Hoo boy.",
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FiveThirtyEight Oliver Roeder reviews a new academic paper from two professors at Clemson analyzing the tweets which were part of the Russian election interference. The findings are impressive, but I worry that real headline is buried at the end of the article:

Russia’s attempts to distract, divide, and demoralize has been called a form of political war,” the authors conclude in their paper. “This analysis has given insight into the methods the IRA used to engage in this war.” This war may or may not have had an effect on the 2016 election, but it certainly wreaked havoc. The man who would be named national security adviser followed and pushed the message of Russian troll accounts, according to the Daily Beast, and Trump’s eldest son, campaign manager and digital director each retweeted a Russian troll in the month before the election. Twitter itself informed 1.4 million people that they’d interacted with Russian trolls.

But the researchers emphasized that the Russian disinformation and discord campaign on Twitter extends well beyond even that. “There were more tweets in the year after the election than there were in the year before the election,” Warren said. “I want to shout this from the rooftops. This is not just an election thing. It’s a continuing intervention in the political conversation in America.”

​Hoo boy.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/present-tense-interference/",
"date_published": "2018-08-01T00:00:00-04:00",
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{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/what-bob-mueller-doing/",
"title": "What is Bob Mueller Doing?",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein created the Special Counsel’s Office (SCO) on May 17, 2017 and named Bob Mueller to run it. Upon its creation, the SCO inherited the counterintelligence investigation of the Russian election interference from the FBI. That investigation had been going on since well before the election, at least as early as July 2016, and perhaps as early as April 2016, when a Trump Campaign staffer famously got drunk and bragged about Russia sharing “dirt” on Hillary Clinton with the Trump Campaign.I’m going to sum up the documents that Mueller’s team has publicly filed, what they mean, and what they can tell us about where the investigation might head next. We’re going to go in chronological order. 1. PapadopoulosOn October 5, 2017, the above-referenced staffer, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI. He lied about his contacts with two people he believed to be linked to the Russian government. It’s not a crime to talk to people you think may have connections to the Russian government, but it is a crime to lie to the FBI when they ask you about it.As part of Papadopoulos’s plea bargain, he told the FBI about the many times he emailed his colleagues in the Trump Campaign about his Russian contacts. This included members of the Trump Campaign foreign policy team, Papadopoulos’s supervisor, an unnamed “senior policy advisor,” and a “high-ranking campaign official,” all of whom received a series of updates as emailed back and forth with the Russians.Mueller-ology: By flipping Papadopoulos, the SCO showed that multiple levels of the Trump Campaign knew about the sustained contacts with Russia. Further, the campaign knew these contacts persisted after one of those Russian contacts informed Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” The smartest lawyers who I read on this stuff say the FBI is using the same tactics to in this investigation that they use to bust organized crime syndicates. Here, Mueller’s started with Papadopoulos, who flipped and explained what senior Trump Campaign officials knew about Russian contacts. Then the FBI interviewed one of those officials to see if they’ll lie. Which brings us to the next guilty plea.2. FlynnOn December 1, 2017, Michael Flynn, a senior Trump Campaign official who briefly served as the President’s National Security Advisor, pled guilty to lying to the FBI. Specifically, Flynn lied about his recollection of a phone call he had with the Russian Ambassador, during which he asked Russia to moderate its response to sanctions imposed by President Obama in December 2016. Flynn also admitted he lied about conversations with several other countries regarding an Egyptian resolution to the United Nations Security Council.By getting a guilty plea out of Flynn, the SCO showed the contacts with Russia were not limited to a single foreign policy staffer. In addition to being aware of a series of others’ Russian contacts, senior Trump Campaign officials were in contact with at least one Russian official themselves.Mueller-ology: So now we’ve moved up the ladder to someone who was actually quite deep into the Trump White House inner circle; the SCO apparently got there in one move from Papadopoulos. Flynn could be a good resource for uncovering other criminal activities in the inner circle, but it’s too early to tell just yet. As of this writing, Flynn hasn’t been sentenced, which is often a sign that the defendant is actively assisting prosecutors. Or maybe Flynn has yet to provide any useful information, but the SCO thinks he might at some date.3. PinedoOn February 12, 2018, Richard Pinedo pled guilty to identity theft; he provided services by which people could circumvent the security features of “large online digital payment companies,” which I assume means companies like Paypal. Remember in the section on Papadopoulos, when I said “it’s not a crime to get in touch with Russians?” Well, it is a crime to get paid to commit identity theft, whether for Russians or not. Pinedo did not work for or have any connection to the Trump campaign whatsoever. When the FBI tracked Pinedo down, I’d bet he was pretty surprised to find out he was involved in the Russian election interference investigation.Mueller-ology: Looks like the SCO stumbled upon some random hacker while tracking down Russians.4. Internet Research AgencyOn February 16, 2018, Mueller’s team indicted three Russian companies and thirteen Russian nationals for conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, and identity theft. Ordinarily, I’d say “this case is never going to trial” because Russia doesn’t extradite people to America. However, this case might actually go to trial because one of the defendants hired an American law firm to represent them from abroad. To date, the parties have been fighting over pre-trial motions to disclose evidence, which has afforded the defense some nice opportunities to troll the SCO in front of a judge.It’s important to note that while the companies involved are owned by people with links to Russian government officials, they’re technically not government bodies. It seems that this kind of arrangement is not uncommon in Russia, as it affords a certain amount of plausible deniability for the Russian government when they do shady things like collude with an American presidential campaign. Either way, this indictment serves to demonstrate the existence of a Russian scheme to interfere in the election by the systematic abuse of social media.Mueller-ology: Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. We’re not demonstrating any links between Russia and the Trump Campaign here – remember that’s what Papadopoulos and Flynn were for. But we already knew there was a campaign full of people interested in talking to Russians about helping in the election, and now we know there was also a building full of Russians looking to meddle in the election. The argument against collusion now has to be “they were just two ships passing in the night.” I imagine that once Mueller’s investigation is finished, that might not pass the straight face test.5. Van Der ZwaanOn February 20, 2018, Alex Van Der Zwaan pled guilty to lying the FBI about the extent of his contacts with Paul Manafort and Richard Gates (we’re getting to them). Van Der Zwaan is an attorney who worked at a law firm hired by the Ukrainian government to write a report in 2012; the report was meant to show a political opposition leader had been legitimately jailed, instead of jailed in the way you’d expect a former Soviet state would jail a political opposition leader.Van Der Zwaan was not accused of malfeasance during the election (he wasn’t a member of the Trump campaign), but he did lie and withhold evidence from the FBI about his contacts with a couple of important suspects. In exchange for his eventual cooperation, Van Der Zwaan served 30 days in jail and was deported.Mueller-ology: Yep. Lying to the FBI is still a crime. The fact that the SCO sought jail time for someone as ancillary as Van Der Zwaan was probably meant to scare future witnesses more than anything else. Likewise, because Van Der Zwaan has already gone to prison, been released from prison, and been deported to the Netherlands, we can assume he’s done providing information to the SCO’s folks.6. Manafort and GatesOn February 22, 2018, Paul Manafort and Richard Gates were indicted on eighteen and twenty-three federal felonies (respectively) in Virginia. The two men were charged with tax evasion, assisting with tax evasion, failure to report foreign bank accounts, more tax evasion, and lots of bank fraud. Manafort and Gates were business partners running a shady political consulting firm in Eastern Europe, where they did lots of business with Russian oligarchs. They were also the Trump Campaign’s chairman and deputy chairman for a time, and Gates served as the second-highest ranking official on the Trump Presidential Transition Team. Outside of Trump’s kids, there aren’t any bigger fish in the pond.Note that this indictment does not itself allege either man committed crimes during the 2016 Presidential campaign. In fact, as Manafort prepares to go to trial over these charges next week, the SCO has explicitly stated that no portion of the trial will mention Trump or the 2016 campaign. Rather, this is just about proving what shady businessmen these guys were.Mueller-ology: I don’t think you can fairly say Van Der Zwaan flipped on these two, but once the FBI started pulling on the threads of Manafort’s and Gates’s business dealings, dozens of felonies just kind of came tumbling out. It seems to me that Mueller wants to flip these two before he proceeds with the final stage of the investigation, which will probably involve interviewing the President. This is the SCO leaning on Manafort as hard as they can; Trump really needs Manafort and Gates to stay strong and not flip under any circumstances.7. GatesOn February 23, 2018, Richard Gates flipped. The astute reader will note that Gates lasted all of one day before pleading guilty to several conspiracies: tax evasion, failing to report foreign bank accounts, failing to register as a foreign agent, as well as lying to the FBI. Forced with the possibility of spending hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) of dollars on a legal defense, Gates pled guilty.Mueller-ology: Gates is likely an extremely useful witness to all sorts of malfeasance during the campaign. He’s probably told the FBI what he knows about that already. If Manafort really does keep his mouth shut and lives out his days in prison, Gates can probably help the SCO investigate Trump Campaign crimes. But it’s blindingly obvious that Manafort is central to the SCO’s investigation, and Gates’s prime use to Mueller at the moment is increasing the amount of pressure on Manafort. And really, nobody will be more helpful in uncovering Manafort’s white-collar crimes than Manafort’s business partner, so Gates is a nice two-fer.8. Manafort & KilimnikOn June 8, 2018, Manafort was indicted in the District of Columbia for an additional seven felonies, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to launder money, failure to register as a foreign agent, lying to the FBI, and obstruction of justice. A former Russian military intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik has been charged for these crimes as well, even though he is a Russian national who will never see an American courtroom.Mueller-ology: These charges are in addition to the eighteen felonies Manafort is charged with in the Virginia federal court. So Manafort has two separate trials in the coming months. The only thing worse than defending yourself against a giant federal criminal case is having to do it twice, back to back. I don’t believe Mueller cares much whether Manafort takes a plea bargain because he’s convicted or because he’s flat broke, but the SCO is going to see which happens first.Legally, the stakes here are enormous for Manafort: if he’s convicted of even a fraction of what he’s accused of, he’s almost certain to spend the rest of his life in jail. The amount of pressure Mueller’s putting on Manafort is just breathtaking. Mueller and the FBI know a lot of things we don’t, and one of those things is “exactly why it’s so important that Paul Manafort flip on the President.”9. The GRUSee here.Mueller-ology: it sure seems like the prosecution of Trump campaign officials is on hold pending Manafort’s decision to cooperate. In the meantime, the SCO peeled back another layer of the Russian investigation; we knew a handful of companies and a dozen social media trolls that were out to interfere in our election. Now we know Russian military intelligence officers broke into one of the campaigns and used what they found to assist their preferred candidate. We also know there was at least one political operative (whose name rhymes with Dodger Throne) who was in contact with both the Trump campaign and these Russian spies regarding email leaks and other internal campaign records. The situation is looking less “two ships passing in the night” and more “two people sitting in a tiny rowboat singing Russian Drinking Songs.”10. What’s NextTheoretically, there are other Russian intelligence agencies who the investigation could target: apart from the GRU’s spies, an entirely different Russian intelligence agency broke into the DNC’s computers, and neither of them knew the other was there. But from where I’m sitting, the Russian half of the puzzle looks pretty filled in. We know there was a wide-ranging effort in both the public and private sectors of Russia to support the Trump campaign. Whether that effort involved one building of spies or two buildings of spies doesn’t strike me as particularly earth-shattering.I’m convinced the investigation is on hold while we wait for Paul Manafort to decide what he’s going to do. The fact that he’s going to trial is a little surprising, given how grim his financial and legal situation looks. Maybe Manafort is trying to wait out the Special Counsel; Manafort might think if he can tie this thing up in court long enough, the FBI will find the information they need elsewhere, and he can just get pardoned and go back to his life. Maybe Manafort legitimately doesn’t know anything useful, or maybe he’s afraid of what happens when you make Russian spies unhappy.Either way, we’re going to start seeing the SCO’s evidence on the American side of the puzzle next week. It should be quite educational.",
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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein created the Special Counsel’s Office (SCO) on May 17, 2017 and named Bob Mueller to run it. Upon its creation, the SCO inherited the counterintelligence investigation of the Russian election interference from the FBI. That investigation had been going on since well before the election, at least as early as July 2016, and perhaps as early as April 2016, when a Trump Campaign staffer famously got drunk and bragged about Russia sharing “dirt” on Hillary Clinton with the Trump Campaign.

I’m going to sum up the documents that Mueller’s team has publicly filed, what they mean, and what they can tell us about where the investigation might head next. We’re going to go in chronological order.

1. Papadopoulos

On October 5, 2017, the above-referenced staffer, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI. He lied about his contacts with two people he believed to be linked to the Russian government. It’s not a crime to talk to people you think may have connections to the Russian government, but it is a crime to lie to the FBI when they ask you about it.

As part of Papadopoulos’s plea bargain, he told the FBI about the many times he emailed his colleagues in the Trump Campaign about his Russian contacts. This included members of the Trump Campaign foreign policy team, Papadopoulos’s supervisor, an unnamed “senior policy advisor,” and a “high-ranking campaign official,” all of whom received a series of updates as emailed back and forth with the Russians.

Mueller-ology: By flipping Papadopoulos, the SCO showed that multiple levels of the Trump Campaign knew about the sustained contacts with Russia. Further, the campaign knew these contacts persisted after one of those Russian contacts informed Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” The smartest lawyers who I read on this stuff say the FBI is using the same tactics to in this investigation that they use to bust organized crime syndicates. Here, Mueller’s started with Papadopoulos, who flipped and explained what senior Trump Campaign officials knew about Russian contacts. Then the FBI interviewed one of those officials to see if they’ll lie. Which brings us to the next guilty plea.

2. Flynn

On December 1, 2017, Michael Flynn, a senior Trump Campaign official who briefly served as the President’s National Security Advisor, pled guilty to lying to the FBI. Specifically, Flynn lied about his recollection of a phone call he had with the Russian Ambassador, during which he asked Russia to moderate its response to sanctions imposed by President Obama in December 2016. Flynn also admitted he lied about conversations with several other countries regarding an Egyptian resolution to the United Nations Security Council.

By getting a guilty plea out of Flynn, the SCO showed the contacts with Russia were not limited to a single foreign policy staffer. In addition to being aware of a series of others’ Russian contacts, senior Trump Campaign officials were in contact with at least one Russian official themselves.

Mueller-ology: So now we’ve moved up the ladder to someone who was actually quite deep into the Trump White House inner circle; the SCO apparently got there in one move from Papadopoulos. Flynn could be a good resource for uncovering other criminal activities in the inner circle, but it’s too early to tell just yet. As of this writing, Flynn hasn’t been sentenced, which is often a sign that the defendant is actively assisting prosecutors. Or maybe Flynn has yet to provide any useful information, but the SCO thinks he might at some date.

3. Pinedo

On February 12, 2018, Richard Pinedo pled guilty to identity theft; he provided services by which people could circumvent the security features of “large online digital payment companies,” which I assume means companies like Paypal. Remember in the section on Papadopoulos, when I said “it’s not a crime to get in touch with Russians?” Well, it is a crime to get paid to commit identity theft, whether for Russians or not. Pinedo did not work for or have any connection to the Trump campaign whatsoever. When the FBI tracked Pinedo down, I’d bet he was pretty surprised to find out he was involved in the Russian election interference investigation.

Mueller-ology: Looks like the SCO stumbled upon some random hacker while tracking down Russians.

4. Internet Research Agency

On February 16, 2018, Mueller’s team indicted three Russian companies and thirteen Russian nationals for conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, and identity theft. Ordinarily, I’d say “this case is never going to trial” because Russia doesn’t extradite people to America. However, this case might actually go to trial because one of the defendants hired an American law firm to represent them from abroad. To date, the parties have been fighting over pre-trial motions to disclose evidence, which has afforded the defense some nice opportunities to troll the SCO in front of a judge.

It’s important to note that while the companies involved are owned by people with links to Russian government officials, they’re technically not government bodies. It seems that this kind of arrangement is not uncommon in Russia, as it affords a certain amount of plausible deniability for the Russian government when they do shady things like collude with an American presidential campaign. Either way, this indictment serves to demonstrate the existence of a Russian scheme to interfere in the election by the systematic abuse of social media.

Mueller-ology: Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. We’re not demonstrating any links between Russia and the Trump Campaign here – remember that’s what Papadopoulos and Flynn were for. But we already knew there was a campaign full of people interested in talking to Russians about helping in the election, and now we know there was also a building full of Russians looking to meddle in the election. The argument against collusion now has to be “they were just two ships passing in the night.” I imagine that once Mueller’s investigation is finished, that might not pass the straight face test.

5. Van Der Zwaan

On February 20, 2018, Alex Van Der Zwaan pled guilty to lying the FBI about the extent of his contacts with Paul Manafort and Richard Gates (we’re getting to them). Van Der Zwaan is an attorney who worked at a law firm hired by the Ukrainian government to write a report in 2012; the report was meant to show a political opposition leader had been legitimately jailed, instead of jailed in the way you’d expect a former Soviet state would jail a political opposition leader.

Van Der Zwaan was not accused of malfeasance during the election (he wasn’t a member of the Trump campaign), but he did lie and withhold evidence from the FBI about his contacts with a couple of important suspects. In exchange for his eventual cooperation, Van Der Zwaan served 30 days in jail and was deported.

Mueller-ology: Yep. Lying to the FBI is still a crime. The fact that the SCO sought jail time for someone as ancillary as Van Der Zwaan was probably meant to scare future witnesses more than anything else. Likewise, because Van Der Zwaan has already gone to prison, been released from prison, and been deported to the Netherlands, we can assume he’s done providing information to the SCO’s folks.

6. Manafort and Gates

On February 22, 2018, Paul Manafort and Richard Gates were indicted on eighteen and twenty-three federal felonies (respectively) in Virginia. The two men were charged with tax evasion, assisting with tax evasion, failure to report foreign bank accounts, more tax evasion, and lots of bank fraud. Manafort and Gates were business partners running a shady political consulting firm in Eastern Europe, where they did lots of business with Russian oligarchs. They were also the Trump Campaign’s chairman and deputy chairman for a time, and Gates served as the second-highest ranking official on the Trump Presidential Transition Team. Outside of Trump’s kids, there aren’t any bigger fish in the pond.

Note that this indictment does not itself allege either man committed crimes during the 2016 Presidential campaign. In fact, as Manafort prepares to go to trial over these charges next week, the SCO has explicitly stated that no portion of the trial will mention Trump or the 2016 campaign. Rather, this is just about proving what shady businessmen these guys were.

Mueller-ology: I don’t think you can fairly say Van Der Zwaan flipped on these two, but once the FBI started pulling on the threads of Manafort’s and Gates’s business dealings, dozens of felonies just kind of came tumbling out. It seems to me that Mueller wants to flip these two before he proceeds with the final stage of the investigation, which will probably involve interviewing the President. This is the SCO leaning on Manafort as hard as they can; Trump really needs Manafort and Gates to stay strong and not flip under any circumstances.

7. Gates

On February 23, 2018, Richard Gates flipped. The astute reader will note that Gates lasted all of one day before pleading guilty to several conspiracies: tax evasion, failing to report foreign bank accounts, failing to register as a foreign agent, as well as lying to the FBI. Forced with the possibility of spending hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) of dollars on a legal defense, Gates pled guilty.

Mueller-ology: Gates is likely an extremely useful witness to all sorts of malfeasance during the campaign. He’s probably told the FBI what he knows about that already. If Manafort really does keep his mouth shut and lives out his days in prison, Gates can probably help the SCO investigate Trump Campaign crimes. But it’s blindingly obvious that Manafort is central to the SCO’s investigation, and Gates’s prime use to Mueller at the moment is increasing the amount of pressure on Manafort. And really, nobody will be more helpful in uncovering Manafort’s white-collar crimes than Manafort’s business partner, so Gates is a nice two-fer.

8. Manafort & Kilimnik

On June 8, 2018, Manafort was indicted in the District of Columbia for an additional seven felonies, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to launder money, failure to register as a foreign agent, lying to the FBI, and obstruction of justice. A former Russian military intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik has been charged for these crimes as well, even though he is a Russian national who will never see an American courtroom.

Mueller-ology: These charges are in addition to the eighteen felonies Manafort is charged with in the Virginia federal court. So Manafort has two separate trials in the coming months. The only thing worse than defending yourself against a giant federal criminal case is having to do it twice, back to back. I don’t believe Mueller cares much whether Manafort takes a plea bargain because he’s convicted or because he’s flat broke, but the SCO is going to see which happens first.

Legally, the stakes here are enormous for Manafort: if he’s convicted of even a fraction of what he’s accused of, he’s almost certain to spend the rest of his life in jail. The amount of pressure Mueller’s putting on Manafort is just breathtaking. Mueller and the FBI know a lot of things we don’t, and one of those things is “exactly why it’s so important that Paul Manafort flip on the President.”

9. The GRU

Mueller-ology: it sure seems like the prosecution of Trump campaign officials is on hold pending Manafort’s decision to cooperate. In the meantime, the SCO peeled back another layer of the Russian investigation; we knew a handful of companies and a dozen social media trolls that were out to interfere in our election. Now we know Russian military intelligence officers broke into one of the campaigns and used what they found to assist their preferred candidate. We also know there was at least one political operative (whose name rhymes with Dodger Throne) who was in contact with both the Trump campaign and these Russian spies regarding email leaks and other internal campaign records. The situation is looking less “two ships passing in the night” and more “two people sitting in a tiny rowboat singing Russian Drinking Songs.”

10. What’s Next

Theoretically, there are other Russian intelligence agencies who the investigation could target: apart from the GRU’s spies, an entirely different Russian intelligence agency broke into the DNC’s computers, and neither of them knew the other was there. But from where I’m sitting, the Russian half of the puzzle looks pretty filled in. We know there was a wide-ranging effort in both the public and private sectors of Russia to support the Trump campaign. Whether that effort involved one building of spies or two buildings of spies doesn’t strike me as particularly earth-shattering.

I’m convinced the investigation is on hold while we wait for Paul Manafort to decide what he’s going to do. The fact that he’s going to trial is a little surprising, given how grim his financial and legal situation looks. Maybe Manafort is trying to wait out the Special Counsel; Manafort might think if he can tie this thing up in court long enough, the FBI will find the information they need elsewhere, and he can just get pardoned and go back to his life. Maybe Manafort legitimately doesn’t know anything useful, or maybe he’s afraid of what happens when you make Russian spies unhappy.

Either way, we’re going to start seeing the SCO’s evidence on the American side of the puzzle next week. It should be quite educational.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/what-bob-mueller-doing/",
"date_published": "2018-07-23T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-07-23T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/bouie-war-white-electorate/",
"title": "Bouie on the War for a White Electorate",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Jamelle Bouie on The War for a White Electorate in Slate: Even if you blocked all immigration to the United States and removed millions of naturalized citizens, existing trends make demographic change inevitable. At some point in the not-distant future, a majority of Americans will be of black, Hispanic, and Asian origin. But there’s a difference between a nation’s population and its electorate—its share of people who can exercise the full rights and privileges of citizenship. Republicans realize this, and are trying—at every level of government—to reverse-engineer a white electorate large enough to secure their own power, and along with it, the existing hierarchy of class and race. Donald Trump is a major part of this story. But as with all things Trump, it would be wrong to treat this project as unique to him and his administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House adviser Stephen Miller, as well as former advisers Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, are unusually driven in their commitment to a racial vision of the American state: Sessions once praised the nativist 1924 Immigration Act, and Anton, writing under a pseudonym, once warned that the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners” would mean a “less traditionally American” electorate. But they are also largely in line with a broader Republican politics that’s become reliant on the revanchist anger of a white minority. Supercharged in reaction to Barack Obama, that motivated minority of the electorate delivered a House majority in 2010, a Senate majority in 2014, and brought unified GOP control to state governments across the country.”Read this one together with Matt Yglesias’s piece for Vox on normcore politics. Even if Trump resigned today, there are plenty of other people in the Republican Party who’d carry on this work.",
"content_html": "

Even if you blocked all immigration to the United States and removed millions of naturalized citizens, existing trends make demographic change inevitable. At some point in the not-distant future, a majority of Americans will be of black, Hispanic, and Asian origin. But there’s a difference between a nation’s population and its electorate—its share of people who can exercise the full rights and privileges of citizenship. Republicans realize this, and are trying—at every level of government—to reverse-engineer a white electorate large enough to secure their own power, and along with it, the existing hierarchy of class and race.

Donald Trump is a major part of this story. But as with all things Trump, it would be wrong to treat this project as unique to him and his administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House adviser Stephen Miller, as well as former advisers Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, are unusually driven in their commitment to a racial vision of the American state: Sessions once praised the nativist 1924 Immigration Act, and Anton, writing under a pseudonym, once warned that the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners” would mean a “less traditionally American” electorate. But they are also largely in line with a broader Republican politics that’s become reliant on the revanchist anger of a white minority. Supercharged in reaction to Barack Obama, that motivated minority of the electorate delivered a House majority in 2010, a Senate majority in 2014, and brought unified GOP control to state governments across the country.”

Read this one together with Matt Yglesias’s piece for Vox on normcore politics. Even if Trump resigned today, there are plenty of other people in the Republican Party who’d carry on this work.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/bouie-war-white-electorate/",
"date_published": "2018-07-17T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-07-17T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/when-algorithms-surprise-us/",
"title": "When Algorithms Surprise Us",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Research scientist Janelle Shane writes a blog called AI Weirdness, examining how artificial intelligence isn’t always so intelligent. Here’s a post on what happens When algorithms surprise us: Something as apparently benign as a list-sorting algorithm could also solve problems in rather innocently sinister ways. Well, it’s not unsorted: For example, there was an algorithm that was supposed to sort a list of numbers. Instead, it learned to delete the list, so that it was no longer technically unsorted. Solving the Kobayashi Maru test: Another algorithm was supposed to minimize the difference between its own answers and the correct answers. It found where the answers were stored and deleted them, so it would get a perfect score. How to win at tic-tac-toe: In another beautiful example, in 1997 some programmers built algorithms that could play tic-tac-toe remotely against each other on an infinitely large board. One programmer, rather than designing their algorithm’s strategy, let it evolve its own approach. Surprisingly, the algorithm suddenly began winning all its games. It turned out that the algorithm’s strategy was to place its move very, very far away, so that when its opponent’s computer tried to simulate the new greatly-expanded board, the huge gameboard would cause it to run out of memory and crash, forfeiting the game.To paraphrase friend of the blog James Grimmelmann, I’m not worried about humanity being killed off by a super intelligent AI, I’m worried about us being killed off by a dumb AI that just has a lot of resources at its disposal.",
"content_html": "

Research scientist Janelle Shane writes a blog called AI Weirdness, examining how artificial intelligence isn’t always so intelligent. Here’s a post on what happens When algorithms surprise us:

Something as apparently benign as a list-sorting algorithm could also solve problems in rather innocently sinister ways.

Well, it’s not unsorted: For example, there was an algorithm that was supposed to sort a list of numbers. Instead, it learned to delete the list, so that it was no longer technically unsorted.

Solving the Kobayashi Maru test: Another algorithm was supposed to minimize the difference between its own answers and the correct answers. It found where the answers were stored and deleted them, so it would get a perfect score.

How to win at tic-tac-toe: In another beautiful example, in 1997 some programmers built algorithms that could play tic-tac-toe remotely against each other on an infinitely large board. One programmer, rather than designing their algorithm’s strategy, let it evolve its own approach. Surprisingly, the algorithm suddenly began winning all its games. It turned out that the algorithm’s strategy was to place its move very, very far away, so that when its opponent’s computer tried to simulate the new greatly-expanded board, the huge gameboard would cause it to run out of memory and crash, forfeiting the game.

To paraphrase friend of the blog James Grimmelmann, I’m not worried about humanity being killed off by a super intelligent AI, I’m worried about us being killed off by a dumb AI that just has a lot of resources at its disposal.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/when-algorithms-surprise-us/",
"date_published": "2018-07-16T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-07-16T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/dont-feed-trolls/",
"title": "Don’t Feed the Trolls",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Film Crit Hulk wrote an article for The Verge called “Don’t feed the trolls, and other hideous lies,” and it’s excellent from start to finish. Here are a couple of my favorite bits: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are now so large that they are considered “unmoderatable” communities. We like to pretend this was a pure facet of their size, but it is inescapably a part of their ethos. They are platforms forged in the fires of troll culture, founded and operated by techno-libertarians who didn’t understand why they had to care about any of this. They set out with no intention to moderate at all. Zuckerberg just wanted to rate hot girls, after all. But in 2018, the staggering effects of non-moderation are just starting to hit them, and they have little idea how to address or even intellectually engage with the idea. […] It all harkens back to Cliff Pervocracy’s analogy of the “missing stair,” where everyone works around the obvious dangers of a situation because they are so used to “dealing with it” by outright ignoring it. If someone speaks up about the danger, they are dismissed. Why complain when you can “just hop over” the missing stair? But on a systemic level, it all adds up to something so much more than a mere missing stair. For many people on the internet — especially women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community — it is an entire broken staircase, full of loose nails, jutting floorboards, and impossible leaps. And there are so many others who don’t notice it because they either get to use the elevator or are already on the top floor.​That second paragraph is a really nice and succinct explanation of why I’ve always had pretty good success ignoring the trolls: because I’ve had a pretty comprehensive set of privileges going for me. Most of that didn’t really dawn on me until sometime around the worst of Gamergate. Guys like me were making fun of Nerds Angry About Girls In Video Games, but we never seemed to catch a lot of flak, especially not compared to what women saying the same thing caught.It definitely strikes me as weird that big tech platforms just abandoned the idea of moderating their platform at all. I guess that says more about the kinds of people who can afford to start a company in their dorm room than it says about the users, but at least the users can get some better advice than “don’t feed the trolls.”",
"content_html": "

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are now so large that they are considered “unmoderatable” communities. We like to pretend this was a pure facet of their size, but it is inescapably a part of their ethos. They are platforms forged in the fires of troll culture, founded and operated by techno-libertarians who didn’t understand why they had to care about any of this. They set out with no intention to moderate at all. Zuckerberg just wanted to rate hot girls, after all. But in 2018, the staggering effects of non-moderation are just starting to hit them, and they have little idea how to address or even intellectually engage with the idea. […]

It all harkens back to Cliff Pervocracy’s analogy of the “missing stair,” where everyone works around the obvious dangers of a situation because they are so used to “dealing with it” by outright ignoring it. If someone speaks up about the danger, they are dismissed. Why complain when you can “just hop over” the missing stair? But on a systemic level, it all adds up to something so much more than a mere missing stair. For many people on the internet — especially women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community — it is an entire broken staircase, full of loose nails, jutting floorboards, and impossible leaps. And there are so many others who don’t notice it because they either get to use the elevator or are already on the top floor.

​That second paragraph is a really nice and succinct explanation of why I’ve always had pretty good success ignoring the trolls: because I’ve had a pretty comprehensive set of privileges going for me. Most of that didn’t really dawn on me until sometime around the worst of Gamergate. Guys like me were making fun of Nerds Angry About Girls In Video Games, but we never seemed to catch a lot of flak, especially not compared to what women saying the same thing caught.

It definitely strikes me as weird that big tech platforms just abandoned the idea of moderating their platform at all. I guess that says more about the kinds of people who can afford to start a company in their dorm room than it says about the users, but at least the users can get some better advice than “don’t feed the trolls.”

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/dont-feed-trolls/",
"date_published": "2018-07-14T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-07-14T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/mueller-july-2018-indictment/",
"title": "Mueller's July 2018 Indictment",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Today, Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s team of attorneys filed an indictment against twelve Russian nationals in a US District Court. This is the Special Counsel’s third indictment with Russian defendants; because Russia does not extradite its nationals to the US, it’s vanishingly unlikely any of these folks will see the inside of a jail cell or even a courtroom.You’ll remember that in February 2018, the Special Counsel indicted three Russian companies and thirteen Russian nationals for “violating U.S. criminal laws in order to interfere with U.S. elections and political processes.” Today’s indictment is different because these defendants were’t stirring up Twitter drama and committing a little light wire fraud. The July 2018 defendants are all members of Russian military intelligence services with the GRU. The indictment provides their names, ranks, workplace locations, and a couple of fun surprises.Things that jumped out at meThe Russians spearphished dozens of Clinton campaign staffers starting in March 2016 and continuing through July 2016. (¶21) The story of how John Podesta’s emails were hacked has been fairly widely reported for a while now. But what hasn’t been widely reported, and what’s the first big bombshell in this indictment, is that on the night of July 27, 2016, the Russians attempted for the first time to spearfish email accounts at Clinton’s personal email provider. (¶22) Up until July 27, the Russians were hacking into DCCC and DNC work email accounts. But July 27 was the day of Candidate Trump’s ”Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you find those 30,000 emails” press conference. You should be losing your mind over this.Katy Tur, NBC’s reporter embedded with the Trump campaign at that press conference, remembered that line today: Trump and his campaign tried to claim he was kidding. He was not. At that same press conference, minutes later, I asked if it gave him “pause” to ask a foreign government to hack into the emails of any American citizen. He said no and then accused me of trying to “save” Clinton.Joking or not (hint: he wasn’t), Trump made a request to Russian military intelligence officers, who did their best to fulfill that request hours later. That’s absolutely flabbergasting, and it’s going to get worse before we’re done here. But first, the indictment takes a little detour where the theme seems to be “hey did you know the FBI is pretty good at this espionage thing, too?” The indictment lays out the damn search terms and browsing history of one of the defendants, a GRU spy named Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov. There’s regular creepy, there’s Facebook creepy, and then there’s FBI creepy. This isn’t some boring forensic analysis of the DNC’s servers where you read out what some log files said; the FBI knows what he did last summer. (¶23)Whatever magicks the FBI used, they also did the boring forensic analysis; the indictment describes how the Russians hacked into the DCCC’s network and used that network to get into the DNC’s network. (¶26) By April 2016, there were keyloggers installed on DCCC desktops, and the Russians were in full-on “harvest passwords and documents” mode. By June, the Russians owned 33 DNC computers and the DNC’s mail server, from which they grabbed something like fifty thousand emails. (¶29) Then the indictment returns to Yermakov’s reading habits: he spent a good amount of time looking up PowerShell commands to run on Exchange to speed up the stealing of emails.Phase Two: The LeakingParagraph 35 is where we start talking about what happened to these stolen documents. There’s been public reporting speculating this for a long time, but the indictment flat-out states that DC Leaks was a Russian intelligence operation and Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian intelligence operation. The FBI has receipts, email addresses, IP addresses, bitcoin wallet addresses, and probably more than they admit here.For my money, this next bit isn’t a huge bombshell, but it’s jaw-dropping in its own right; on June 15, 2016, the Russian spies logged into their Moscow-based server, and between 4:19 PM and 4:56 PM searched their cache of stolen DCCC/DNC emails for certain words and phrases. (¶41) Here’s a sampling: “Some hundreds of sheets” DCleaks Illuminati [ed: LMAO] “Company’s competence”Let’s just pause for a second. The indictment is careful to note in previous paragraphs that the email hacking was staged through servers based in Arizona and Illinois that the GRU rented to cover its tracks. All the hacked emails were sent back to Russia via VPNs paid for in bitcoins. That’s a fairly standard hacker move to cover your tracks, though it doesn’t appear to have fooled the FBI here.But when the indictment says “Moscow-based”, Mueller’s folks are flexing like crazy. This wasn’t the FBI showing up at a server farm in Arizona with a warrant, grabbing a server, and then going through the logs at their leisure back in the field office. This is something else entirely. I’m dying to know how the FBI got their hands on this specific bit of evidence.So now that the Russians have inspected their loot, they want to get it to the public. The indictment kinda drops this bit and skates right on by, but the FBI knows who got documents from the Russian spies. Paragraph 43 mentions—but doesn’t name—three folks: a candidate for Congress, a lobbyist, and a reporter. The reporter is almost certainly Lee Stranahan, a Sputnik reporter who worked for Breitbart while he was begging Russian spies for stolen documents. The lobbyist is a guy named Aaron Nevins, who bragged about his misadventure to the Wall Street Journal in May 2017. I imagine in the next couple of days, we’ll find out who the Congressional candidate was.And there’s one more guy mentioned here.Roger Stone Is In TroubleThe indictment describes an American “in regular contact with senior Trump campaign officials” who is almost certainly Roger Stone, Candidate Trump’s oldest and closest political advisor, as being in touch with the Russian spies. How do we know it’s Stone? For the dumbest reason possible: Roger Stone posted screenshots of his direct messages with Guccifer 2.0 on his blog, and those messages match today’s indictment word-for-word.Welp. That’s a big ol’ own goal, Rog.But it gets even dumber, because when CNN called Stone to point out “hey man, it’s pretty weird how you showed up in this indictment right” Stone denied it was him and tossed in this gem for good measure: “My contact with the campaign in 2016 was Donald Trump. I was not in regular contact with campaign officials.”I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’m not going to do better than the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell: This is an amazing Roger Stone quote. It was already a stretch to claim that Manafort was a minor player in the Trump campaign. Now apparently Trump himself wasn’t part of the Trump campaign either! Also seems to follow the standard Trump scandal script: deny one alleged crime while possibly suggesting a much bigger one (“oh Russian hackers weren’t using me as a conduit to talk to Trump campaign officials, they were using me as a conduit to talk to Trump!”)Two own goals, then.Closing ThoughtsLike I said, I’m dying to know what the FBI knows about some of these things, and how they know it. That includes a bit in ¶47 that quotes from conversations between the Russian spies and Wikileaks; I don’t know how they got those messages, or the search logs, or that one spy’s browser history. If Bob Mueller knows this much about what Russian spies were doing, imagine how much he knows about what certain Americans were doing.But really, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the Russia-Stone connection all day. These things have been publicly reported already, but seeing it laid out like this is staggering. Let’s imagine the innocent explanation for the facts alleged in this indictment:It’s Summer 2016, a few weeks after the infamous Trump Tower Meeting where top Trump Campaign officials accidentally chatted with a bunch of Russians—who might be spies—about getting damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Some different Russians, who are definitely spies, are chatting with Roger Stone about a slew of hacked emails that could devastate the Clinton campaign. Stone, a veteran of Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign who literally has a tattoo of Tricky Dick, does not have any ideas for the Russians and definitely doesn’t suggest where they could look for incriminating Clinton emails because stealing campaign materials is bad. The next time Stone chats with Donald Trump (the Only Senior Trump Campaign Official he knows) the two do not discuss the mysterious strangers chatting about Clinton’s emails. Later, at a press conference on July 27, 2016, Trump coincidentally blurts out a joke about a hypothetical Russian intelligence operation that he definitely doesn’t know about, and hours later Russian spies—who don’t really follow politics and haven’t heard Trump “joke” about looking for Hillary’s other emails—spontaneously move to a new phase of spearphishing for Clinton staffers’ person email accounts. The following week, Stone publicly repudiates his earlier assertions that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian hacker for no reason whatsoever.…totally innocent, right?",
"content_html": "

Today, Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s team of attorneys filed an indictment against twelve Russian nationals in a US District Court. This is the Special Counsel’s third indictment with Russian defendants; because Russia does not extradite its nationals to the US, it’s vanishingly unlikely any of these folks will see the inside of a jail cell or even a courtroom.

You’ll remember that in February 2018, the Special Counsel indicted three Russian companies and thirteen Russian nationals for “violating U.S. criminal laws in order to interfere with U.S. elections and political processes.” Today’s indictment is different because these defendants were’t stirring up Twitter drama and committing a little light wire fraud. The July 2018 defendants are all members of Russian military intelligence services with the GRU. The indictment provides their names, ranks, workplace locations, and a couple of fun surprises.

Things that jumped out at me

The Russians spearphished dozens of Clinton campaign staffers starting in March 2016 and continuing through July 2016. (¶21) The story of how John Podesta’s emails were hacked has been fairly widely reported for a while now. But what hasn’t been widely reported, and what’s the first big bombshell in this indictment, is that on the night of July 27, 2016, the Russians attempted for the first time to spearfish email accounts at Clinton’s personal email provider. (¶22) Up until July 27, the Russians were hacking into DCCC and DNC work email accounts. But July 27 was the day of Candidate Trump’s ”Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you find those 30,000 emails” press conference. You should be losing your mind over this.

Trump and his campaign tried to claim he was kidding. He was not. At that same press conference, minutes later, I asked if it gave him “pause” to ask a foreign government to hack into the emails of any American citizen. He said no and then accused me of trying to “save” Clinton.

Joking or not (hint: he wasn’t), Trump made a request to Russian military intelligence officers, who did their best to fulfill that request hours later. That’s absolutely flabbergasting, and it’s going to get worse before we’re done here.

But first, the indictment takes a little detour where the theme seems to be “hey did you know the FBI is pretty good at this espionage thing, too?” The indictment lays out the damn search terms and browsing history of one of the defendants, a GRU spy named Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov. There’s regular creepy, there’s Facebook creepy, and then there’s FBI creepy. This isn’t some boring forensic analysis of the DNC’s servers where you read out what some log files said; the FBI knows what he did last summer. (¶23)

Whatever magicks the FBI used, they also did the boring forensic analysis; the indictment describes how the Russians hacked into the DCCC’s network and used that network to get into the DNC’s network. (¶26) By April 2016, there were keyloggers installed on DCCC desktops, and the Russians were in full-on “harvest passwords and documents” mode. By June, the Russians owned 33 DNC computers and the DNC’s mail server, from which they grabbed something like fifty thousand emails. (¶29) Then the indictment returns to Yermakov’s reading habits: he spent a good amount of time looking up PowerShell commands to run on Exchange to speed up the stealing of emails.

Phase Two: The Leaking

Paragraph 35 is where we start talking about what happened to these stolen documents. There’s been public reporting speculating this for a long time, but the indictment flat-out states that DC Leaks was a Russian intelligence operation and Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian intelligence operation. The FBI has receipts, email addresses, IP addresses, bitcoin wallet addresses, and probably more than they admit here.

For my money, this next bit isn’t a huge bombshell, but it’s jaw-dropping in its own right; on June 15, 2016, the Russian spies logged into their Moscow-based server, and between 4:19 PM and 4:56 PM searched their cache of stolen DCCC/DNC emails for certain words and phrases. (¶41) Here’s a sampling:

“Some hundreds of sheets”

DCleaks

Illuminati [ed: LMAO]

“Company’s competence”

Let’s just pause for a second. The indictment is careful to note in previous paragraphs that the email hacking was staged through servers based in Arizona and Illinois that the GRU rented to cover its tracks. All the hacked emails were sent back to Russia via VPNs paid for in bitcoins. That’s a fairly standard hacker move to cover your tracks, though it doesn’t appear to have fooled the FBI here.

But when the indictment says “Moscow-based”, Mueller’s folks are flexing like crazy. This wasn’t the FBI showing up at a server farm in Arizona with a warrant, grabbing a server, and then going through the logs at their leisure back in the field office. This is something else entirely. I’m dying to know how the FBI got their hands on this specific bit of evidence.

So now that the Russians have inspected their loot, they want to get it to the public. The indictment kinda drops this bit and skates right on by, but the FBI knows who got documents from the Russian spies. Paragraph 43 mentions—but doesn’t name—three folks: a candidate for Congress, a lobbyist, and a reporter. The reporter is almost certainly Lee Stranahan, a Sputnik reporter who worked for Breitbart while he was begging Russian spies for stolen documents. The lobbyist is a guy named Aaron Nevins, who bragged about his misadventure to the Wall Street Journal in May 2017. I imagine in the next couple of days, we’ll find out who the Congressional candidate was.

And there’s one more guy mentioned here.

Roger Stone Is In Trouble

The indictment describes an American “in regular contact with senior Trump campaign officials” who is almost certainly Roger Stone, Candidate Trump’s oldest and closest political advisor, as being in touch with the Russian spies. How do we know it’s Stone? For the dumbest reason possible: Roger Stone posted screenshots of his direct messages with Guccifer 2.0 on his blog, and those messages match today’s indictment word-for-word.

Welp. That’s a big ol’ own goal, Rog.

But it gets even dumber, because when CNN called Stone to point out “hey man, it’s pretty weird how you showed up in this indictment right” Stone denied it was him and tossed in this gem for good measure:

“My contact with the campaign in 2016 was Donald Trump. I was not in regular contact with campaign officials.”

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’m not going to do better than the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell:

This is an amazing Roger Stone quote. It was already a stretch to claim that Manafort was a minor player in the Trump campaign. Now apparently Trump himself wasn’t part of the Trump campaign either! Also seems to follow the standard Trump scandal script: deny one alleged crime while possibly suggesting a much bigger one (“oh Russian hackers weren’t using me as a conduit to talk to Trump campaign officials, they were using me as a conduit to talk to Trump!”)

Two own goals, then.

Closing Thoughts

Like I said, I’m dying to know what the FBI knows about some of these things, and how they know it. That includes a bit in ¶47 that quotes from conversations between the Russian spies and Wikileaks; I don’t know how they got those messages, or the search logs, or that one spy’s browser history. If Bob Mueller knows this much about what Russian spies were doing, imagine how much he knows about what certain Americans were doing.

But really, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the Russia-Stone connection all day. These things have been publicly reported already, but seeing it laid out like this is staggering. Let’s imagine the innocent explanation for the facts alleged in this indictment:

It’s Summer 2016, a few weeks after the infamous Trump Tower Meeting where top Trump Campaign officials accidentally chatted with a bunch of Russians—who might be spies—about getting damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Some different Russians, who are definitely spies, are chatting with Roger Stone about a slew of hacked emails that could devastate the Clinton campaign. Stone, a veteran of Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign who literally has a tattoo of Tricky Dick, does not have any ideas for the Russians and definitely doesn’t suggest where they could look for incriminating Clinton emails because stealing campaign materials is bad. The next time Stone chats with Donald Trump (the Only Senior Trump Campaign Official he knows) the two do not discuss the mysterious strangers chatting about Clinton’s emails. Later, at a press conference on July 27, 2016, Trump coincidentally blurts out a joke about a hypothetical Russian intelligence operation that he definitely doesn’t know about, and hours later Russian spies—who don’t really follow politics and haven’t heard Trump “joke” about looking for Hillary’s other emails—spontaneously move to a new phase of spearphishing for Clinton staffers’ person email accounts. The following week, Stone publicly repudiates his earlier assertions that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian hacker for no reason whatsoever.

…totally innocent, right?

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/mueller-july-2018-indictment/",
"date_published": "2018-07-13T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-07-13T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/can-andy-byford-save-subways/",
"title": "Can Andy Byford Save the Subways?",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "The New Yorker’s mandatory long read on the new president of New York City Transit: Can Andy Byford Save the Subways? leaves me feeling more hopeful about the future of the subway than I have in a long time. There are too many fascinating tidbits to choose from, but this bit about a press conference at a railyard really works for me on a couple of levels: Byford caught a 4 train at Bowling Green and then switched to the Coney Island-bound D. It was a swift, on-time ride on relatively clean trains. Byford, who often points out that most subway trips are successful and therefore forgettable, stood in a half-empty car and considered his position. “I need the Governor’s confidence that I will turn things around,” he said. “I sense the crest of my honeymoon period. It’s a gut feeling—a bit like political antennae. If I ignore it, I always regret it.” [New York State’s Governor Andrew] Cuomo arrived, with his aides, in black S.U.V.s. Trackside, he greeted Byford warmly. The Governor, wearing pale chinos and a dark windbreaker, watched a worker demonstrate the magnetic wand, then squatted and ran the instrument under a rail flange himself. With news cameras recording the action, he came up, triumphantly, with a wandful of metal filings.​",
"content_html": "

The New Yorker’s mandatory long read on the new president of New York City Transit: Can Andy Byford Save the Subways? leaves me feeling more hopeful about the future of the subway than I have in a long time. There are too many fascinating tidbits to choose from, but this bit about a press conference at a railyard really works for me on a couple of levels:

Byford caught a 4 train at Bowling Green and then switched to the Coney Island-bound D. It was a swift, on-time ride on relatively clean trains. Byford, who often points out that most subway trips are successful and therefore forgettable, stood in a half-empty car and considered his position. “I need the Governor’s confidence that I will turn things around,” he said. “I sense the crest of my honeymoon period. It’s a gut feeling—a bit like political antennae. If I ignore it, I always regret it.”

[New York State’s Governor Andrew] Cuomo arrived, with his aides, in black S.U.V.s. Trackside, he greeted Byford warmly. The Governor, wearing pale chinos and a dark windbreaker, watched a worker demonstrate the magnetic wand, then squatted and ran the instrument under a rail flange himself. With news cameras recording the action, he came up, triumphantly, with a wandful of metal filings.

​

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/can-andy-byford-save-subways/",
"date_published": "2018-07-08T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-07-08T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/limits-normcore-politics/",
"title": "The Limits of Normcore Politics",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Vox’s Matt Yglesias has a new piece on the limits of normcore politics. It’s a warning to liberals that Donald Trump isn’t necessarily a disease that America needs to resist at all costs, but he might be a symptom of an underlying issue. In Yglesias’s view, “normcore” politics incorrectly assumes Trump is some wild aberration that popped up more or less out of nowhere, and we need to get back to “normal.” But he makes a pretty persuasive argument that “normal” wasn’t that great anyway: The failings of normcore politics start with a somewhat blinkered and romantic view of American history which, as Ezra Klein recently argued in his review of much of the democratic crisis literature, is actually quite ugly. The country was founded on the brutal genocide and dispossession of its native population, relied on chattel slavery as a cornerstone of its economic development, fought a deadly civil war, had the outcome of that war challenged by a largely successful campaign of terrorist violence, and by the 1940s was locking up the Japanese-American population in internment camps.That second sentence is one of the most succinct appraisals of America’s biggest moral failings since before our inception. It’s not strictly relevant to Yglesias’s argument, I just found that bit an impressive bit of wordsmithing.Here’s the really persuasive thrust of his argument, though: Consider, for example, the hardball saga of the “Blue Slip Rule”: Up through 1994 or so there was a tradition in the United States Senate that a judicial nomination could not be brought to the floor unless the nominee received at least one “blue slip” — i.e., favorable recommendation — from a home-state senator. Then in 1995, Republicans won control of the Senate and changed the principle to require two blue slips to advance a judicial nominee, which made it easier to block Bill Clinton’s appointees. In 2001, George W. Bush became president, so they changed the rule back to one blue slip. Jim Jeffords’s defection then gave Democrats control of the Senate, so they moved back to two blue slips to make it easier to block his judges. The two slip rule, critically, remained in effect as long as Democrats controlled the Senate even once Barack Obama took over as president — with Democrats choosing to uphold a senatorial courtesy over partisan advantage. Republicans gained control of the Senate in 2015 and, of course, not only kept the two slip rule in place but basically stopped confirming judges altogether — up to and including holding a Supreme Court seat vacant. When Trump took office, he filled the Supreme Court vacancy with Neil Gorsuch and the GOP swiftly went back to a one blue slip standard, until this May when they broke the seal on confirming judges who had zero blue slips. These shenanigans have profoundly shaped the federal judiciary over the past quarter-century, a period of time during which the courts also handed an election to Bush, dismantled much of federal campaign finance legislation and the Voting Rights Act, and acted to make it virtually impossible to successfully prosecute political corruption cases and a wide array of other white collar crimes to boot. It’s not just the judiciary.Democrats aren’t entirely innocent in the ratcheting up of tensions that provide the backdrop for eroding norms. But it’s pretty clear that there’s been a systematic problem with “normal” for decades, and even if Trump were impeached tomorrow, we wouldn’t suddenly exist in a Golden Age of democracy. There might never have been one.​",
"content_html": "

Vox’s Matt Yglesias has a new piece on the limits of normcore politics. It’s a warning to liberals that Donald Trump isn’t necessarily a disease that America needs to resist at all costs, but he might be a symptom of an underlying issue. In Yglesias’s view, “normcore” politics incorrectly assumes Trump is some wild aberration that popped up more or less out of nowhere, and we need to get back to “normal.” But he makes a pretty persuasive argument that “normal” wasn’t that great anyway:

The failings of normcore politics start with a somewhat blinkered and romantic view of American history which, as Ezra Klein recently argued in his review of much of the democratic crisis literature, is actually quite ugly. The country was founded on the brutal genocide and dispossession of its native population, relied on chattel slavery as a cornerstone of its economic development, fought a deadly civil war, had the outcome of that war challenged by a largely successful campaign of terrorist violence, and by the 1940s was locking up the Japanese-American population in internment camps.

That second sentence is one of the most succinct appraisals of America’s biggest moral failings since before our inception. It’s not strictly relevant to Yglesias’s argument, I just found that bit an impressive bit of wordsmithing.

Here’s the really persuasive thrust of his argument, though:

Consider, for example, the hardball saga of the “Blue Slip Rule”:

Up through 1994 or so there was a tradition in the United States Senate that a judicial nomination could not be brought to the floor unless the nominee received at least one “blue slip” — i.e., favorable recommendation — from a home-state senator.

Then in 1995, Republicans won control of the Senate and changed the principle to require two blue slips to advance a judicial nominee, which made it easier to block Bill Clinton’s appointees.

In 2001, George W. Bush became president, so they changed the rule back to one blue slip. Jim Jeffords’s defection then gave Democrats control of the Senate, so they moved back to two blue slips to make it easier to block his judges.

The two slip rule, critically, remained in effect as long as Democrats controlled the Senate even once Barack Obama took over as president — with Democrats choosing to uphold a senatorial courtesy over partisan advantage.

Republicans gained control of the Senate in 2015 and, of course, not only kept the two slip rule in place but basically stopped confirming judges altogether — up to and including holding a Supreme Court seat vacant.

When Trump took office, he filled the Supreme Court vacancy with Neil Gorsuch and the GOP swiftly went back to a one blue slip standard, until this May when they broke the seal on confirming judges who had zero blue slips.

These shenanigans have profoundly shaped the federal judiciary over the past quarter-century, a period of time during which the courts also handed an election to Bush, dismantled much of federal campaign finance legislation and the Voting Rights Act, and acted to make it virtually impossible to successfully prosecute political corruption cases and a wide array of other white collar crimes to boot.

It’s not just the judiciary.

Democrats aren’t entirely innocent in the ratcheting up of tensions that provide the backdrop for eroding norms. But it’s pretty clear that there’s been a systematic problem with “normal” for decades, and even if Trump were impeached tomorrow, we wouldn’t suddenly exist in a Golden Age of democracy. There might never have been one.

​

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/limits-normcore-politics/",
"date_published": "2018-07-06T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-07-06T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/whats-paul-manafort-ipod/",
"title": "What's On Paul Manafort's iPod?",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Nobody is reading and writing more thoughfully about the Special Counsel’s investigation than freelance national security journalist Marcy Wheeler. Over the weekend, she published an eyebrow-raising note on her continuing obsession with Paul Manafort’s iPods, which the FBI seized in August 2017. Really, her whole note is an exercise in details that make you go “huh, that’s odd,” so let’s just get into it.First, the Special Counsel’s Office has asked the judge to schedule three weeks for the trial, up from two weeks. The first huh: Remember that Mueller originally asked for 70 blank subpoenas (35 sets) to call witnesses for the trial. But after the trial got moved, they asked for 150 subpoenas (75 sets). Now we learn they would like 50% more time for the trial. This shouldn’t be a difficult case, given how much paperwork there is. I wonder why the scope of it has expanded. We know, however, that Mueller neither wants nor will be permitted to raise issues related to Trump.So the scope of the trial keeps increasing, even though Mueller’s folks aren’t going to use the T-word at all. I’m with Wheeler here: tax evasion and money laundering are complicated but not exactly difficult to argue. Maybe the FBI keeps digging up new shell companies and new money laundering, and it’s going to be hard to argue twenty new charges in addition to the twenty-odd from the two Manafort indictments. Or maybe there’s been a lot of developments on the “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” charge that undergirds the broader investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference.Which is where the second huh comes in: Because of my continuing obsession with Manafort’s iPod habit, I’m also really interested in this passage in [Buzzfeed reporter Zoe] Tillman’s report: “On the home search issue, Manafort is arguing that the search warrant was too broad and that investigators had failed to explain at the outset why they reason to believe there would be evidence on various electronic media devices that they seized.” As I’ve laid out, Manafort’s lawyers focused on his iPods from their first suppression motion, claiming, falsely, that the iPods might only be used for music: “For example, the search warrant inventory of electronic devices seized or imaged includes things such as an Apple iPod music device and some Apple iPod Touch music and video devices. No agent could have reasonably believed that he was seizing electronic devices used in the commission of the subject offenses.”Now, I’m no fancy big-city lawyer, but even I know that iPods are great secure communications devices. They run all the same end-to-end encrypted applications as iPhones, but you can walk into a Wal-Mart and buy one with $300 cash instead of giving AT&T your billing address and driver’s license. You can use Signal, you can use WhatsApp, you could even use the iPod as a voice recorder for meetings, such as the June 9 Trump Tower meeting that Manafort attended.And at the hearing Tillman’s reporting on (and Wheeler’s writing about), Manafort’s lawyers again argued about the seizure of the contents of those iPods. The judge has already decided the search of Manafort’s house (in which the iPods were seized) was proper. Manafort’s lawyers aren’t arguing with the judge because he might overrule himself; they’re arguing with the judge because they want an appeals court to decide the judge was wrong. That’s the long game.And then there’s the last huh: Rather than stating that “the government will not be introducing any evidence obtained from those devices at the trial in this case,” Manafort instead claims that “the Special Counsel stated that he would not seek to introduce evidence from the iPods seized from the residence.” Mueller’s team only said they wouldn’t be introducing evidence from the iPods “in this case,” not that they wouldn’t introduce evidence from them “in some future case.”Wheeler correctly points out that Manafort is the only one who can raise the “improper search and seizure” defense against whatever evidence is on those iPods. Mueller’s team isn’t splitting hairs for no reason. Maybe there’s a recording of that meeting on that iPod, and maybe hypothetically incriminates one of the other attendees from the Trump campaign; it’s up to Manafort to suppress that evidence to protect that other attendee in that—hypothetical—future case.",
"content_html": "

Nobody is reading and writing more thoughfully about the Special Counsel’s investigation than freelance national security journalist Marcy Wheeler. Over the weekend, she published an eyebrow-raising note on her continuing obsession with Paul Manafort’s iPods, which the FBI seized in August 2017. Really, her whole note is an exercise in details that make you go “huh, that’s odd,” so let’s just get into it.

First, the Special Counsel’s Office has asked the judge to schedule three weeks for the trial, up from two weeks. The first huh:

Remember that Mueller originally asked for 70 blank subpoenas (35 sets) to call witnesses for the trial. But after the trial got moved, they asked for 150 subpoenas (75 sets). Now we learn they would like 50% more time for the trial. This shouldn’t be a difficult case, given how much paperwork there is. I wonder why the scope of it has expanded. We know, however, that Mueller neither wants nor will be permitted to raise issues related to Trump.

So the scope of the trial keeps increasing, even though Mueller’s folks aren’t going to use the T-word at all. I’m with Wheeler here: tax evasion and money laundering are complicated but not exactly difficult to argue. Maybe the FBI keeps digging up new shell companies and new money laundering, and it’s going to be hard to argue twenty new charges in addition to the twenty-odd from the two Manafort indictments. Or maybe there’s been a lot of developments on the “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” charge that undergirds the broader investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference.

Which is where the second huh comes in:

Because of my continuing obsession with Manafort’s iPod habit, I’m also really interested in this passage in [Buzzfeed reporter Zoe] Tillman’s report: “On the home search issue, Manafort is arguing that the search warrant was too broad and that investigators had failed to explain at the outset why they reason to believe there would be evidence on various electronic media devices that they seized.”

As I’ve laid out, Manafort’s lawyers focused on his iPods from their first suppression motion, claiming, falsely, that the iPods might only be used for music: “For example, the search warrant inventory of electronic devices seized or imaged includes things such as an Apple iPod music device and some Apple iPod Touch music and video devices. No agent could have reasonably believed that he was seizing electronic devices used in the commission of the subject offenses.”

Now, I’m no fancy big-city lawyer, but even I know that iPods are great secure communications devices. They run all the same end-to-end encrypted applications as iPhones, but you can walk into a Wal-Mart and buy one with $300 cash instead of giving AT&T your billing address and driver’s license. You can use Signal, you can use WhatsApp, you could even use the iPod as a voice recorder for meetings, such as the June 9 Trump Tower meeting that Manafort attended.

And at the hearing Tillman’s reporting on (and Wheeler’s writing about), Manafort’s lawyers again argued about the seizure of the contents of those iPods. The judge has already decided the search of Manafort’s house (in which the iPods were seized) was proper. Manafort’s lawyers aren’t arguing with the judge because he might overrule himself; they’re arguing with the judge because they want an appeals court to decide the judge was wrong. That’s the long game.

And then there’s the last huh:

Rather than stating that “the government will not be introducing any evidence obtained from those devices at the trial in this case,” Manafort instead claims that “the Special Counsel stated that he would not seek to introduce evidence from the iPods seized from the residence.” Mueller’s team only said they wouldn’t be introducing evidence from the iPods “in this case,” not that they wouldn’t introduce evidence from them “in some future case.”

Wheeler correctly points out that Manafort is the only one who can raise the “improper search and seizure” defense against whatever evidence is on those iPods. Mueller’s team isn’t splitting hairs for no reason. Maybe there’s a recording of that meeting on that iPod, and maybe hypothetically incriminates one of the other attendees from the Trump campaign; it’s up to Manafort to suppress that evidence to protect that other attendee in that—hypothetical—future case.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/whats-paul-manafort-ipod/",
"date_published": "2018-07-02T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-07-02T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/red-hens-black-lists/",
"title": "Red Hens and Black Lists",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Mari Uyehara, writing in GQ on the breathtaking spinelessness of a Washington Post editorial, and more broadly on why restaurants everywhere should blacklist members of the Trump Administration after Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen: [Red Hen Owner Stephanie] Wilkinson’s recognition of the costs of a principled stance were soon realized. Sanders used her official government Twitter account, instead of her personal one, to criticize the small private business—an ethics violation—and, later in a press conference, described the episode of being politely asked to leave the restaurant as “harm.” Trump jumped in, tweeting that the restaurant was “filthy” and claimed that he “always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!” Hordes of Trump followers targeted a different restaurant, Red Hen in DC, for days of harassment, including death threats and egging. The Washington establishment piled on the small restaurant and its seven-person staff, with an array of misguided commentary. In a now-deleted tweet, Politico’s Jake Sherman, last seen obsequiously defending the administration by decrying Michelle Wolf’s stand-up as “mean,” sided with the president, tweeting “kind of agree on the outside/inside dirtiness deal.” David Axelrod, CNN commentator and former Obama staffer, sarcastically noted: “Oh yes. Let’s get REALLY tough and deprive the Trumpies Chanterelle & Scape Risotto! That will change EVERYTHING!” Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush, snickered: “I guess we’re heading into an America with Democrat-only restaurants, which will lead to Republican-only restaurants.” None, mind you, peeped up when Vice President Joe Biden was turned away by a Virginia cookie shop in 2012.I’m going to skate right on by the old white guys dying to prove how principled they are by carrying water for the right-wing’s half of the outrage-industrial complex here. I hear Vichy is lovely this time of year.Uyehara seems equally irritated by the ridicule lobbed at people standing up for their principles here, and reserves special (and well-deserved) outrage for the morning talk show talking head who decried the Red Hen for violating the spirit of the Civil Rights Act. Now, I’m tempted to go for the easy joke here: if a bake shop in Colorado gets to refuse service to folks based on their marital partners, it seems that discrimination on the basis of employer should be fair game as well.But the easy joke is too easy and too glib for a law blog. First, the Colorado baker won his court case because his state’s civil rights commission was unconstitutionally biased against his religious views, not because the Supreme Court thinks cake-based discrimination against gay people is permissible. The Constitution is 100% silent on cake-based discrimination, so we’re on our own here. No, the Colorado case was a weird decision based on weird facts, and now there’s a growing body of law allowing businesses to use the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause as both shield and sword. Great. Fine. Whatever.Second, take a step back and let’s talk about what discrimination actually means. Uyehara touched on this, but discrimination is the unfair treatment of a class of people who share some immutable characteristic. The Fifteenth Amendment recognizes three characteristics of people upon which it’s illegal to discriminate: race, color, and previous condition of servitude. Congress has added a few more to that list, and now it looks something like this: Race Color Gender Religion National Origin Age Disability Genetic InformationWhen discrimination is alleged, courts take a look, and apply various levels of scrutiny to the defendant’s actions. You will notice that “works for the federal government” is not on that list, otherwise VP Biden could have sued his way into that cookie shop.",
"content_html": "

Mari Uyehara, writing in GQ on the breathtaking spinelessness of a Washington Post editorial, and more broadly on why restaurants everywhere should blacklist members of the Trump Administration after Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen:

[Red Hen Owner Stephanie] Wilkinson’s recognition of the costs of a principled stance were soon realized. Sanders used her official government Twitter account, instead of her personal one, to criticize the small private business—an ethics violation—and, later in a press conference, described the episode of being politely asked to leave the restaurant as “harm.” Trump jumped in, tweeting that the restaurant was “filthy” and claimed that he “always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!” Hordes of Trump followers targeted a different restaurant, Red Hen in DC, for days of harassment, including death threats and egging.

The Washington establishment piled on the small restaurant and its seven-person staff, with an array of misguided commentary. In a now-deleted tweet, Politico’s Jake Sherman, last seen obsequiously defending the administration by decrying Michelle Wolf’s stand-up as “mean,” sided with the president, tweeting “kind of agree on the outside/inside dirtiness deal.” David Axelrod, CNN commentator and former Obama staffer, sarcastically noted: “Oh yes. Let’s get REALLY tough and deprive the Trumpies Chanterelle & Scape Risotto! That will change EVERYTHING!” Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush, snickered: “I guess we’re heading into an America with Democrat-only restaurants, which will lead to Republican-only restaurants.” None, mind you, peeped up when Vice President Joe Biden was turned away by a Virginia cookie shop in 2012.

I’m going to skate right on by the old white guys dying to prove how principled they are by carrying water for the right-wing’s half of the outrage-industrial complex here. I hear Vichy is lovely this time of year.

Uyehara seems equally irritated by the ridicule lobbed at people standing up for their principles here, and reserves special (and well-deserved) outrage for the morning talk show talking head who decried the Red Hen for violating the spirit of the Civil Rights Act. Now, I’m tempted to go for the easy joke here: if a bake shop in Colorado gets to refuse service to folks based on their marital partners, it seems that discrimination on the basis of employer should be fair game as well.

But the easy joke is too easy and too glib for a law blog. First, the Colorado baker won his court case because his state’s civil rights commission was unconstitutionally biased against his religious views, not because the Supreme Court thinks cake-based discrimination against gay people is permissible. The Constitution is 100% silent on cake-based discrimination, so we’re on our own here. No, the Colorado case was a weird decision based on weird facts, and now there’s a growing body of law allowing businesses to use the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause as both shield and sword. Great. Fine. Whatever.

Second, take a step back and let’s talk about what discrimination actually means. Uyehara touched on this, but discrimination is the unfair treatment of a class of people who share some immutable characteristic. The Fifteenth Amendment recognizes three characteristics of people upon which it’s illegal to discriminate: race, color, and previous condition of servitude. Congress has added a few more to that list, and now it looks something like this:

Race

Color

Gender

Religion

National Origin

Age

Disability

Genetic Information

When discrimination is alleged, courts take a look, and apply various levels of scrutiny to the defendant’s actions. You will notice that “works for the federal government” is not on that list, otherwise VP Biden could have sued his way into that cookie shop.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/red-hens-black-lists/",
"date_published": "2018-07-01T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-07-01T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/ny-attorney-general-trump-foundation/",
"title": "NY Attorney General Sues Trump, Foundation",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Thursday, June 14 was President Trump’s birthday. Now, for my birthday, I got a notebook with special fountain pen-friendly paper because I live in Brooklyn, and they’ll kick me out if I don’t use an old-fashioned pen.For the President’s birthday, he and his three favorite children found out they were the subjects of a lawsuit filed by the New York State Attorney General, Barbara Underwood. The AG is suing the four Trumps for their maladministration of the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation; as a bonus, the Foundation itself is a party to the lawsuit.Now, first things first. This is a civil suit, not a criminal case. While the defendants (the four Trumps and the Foundation they run) are accused of breaking the New York State Not-For-Profit Corporation Law, nobody’s going to jail at the end of this trial. The law says non-profits have to do ABC and can’t do XYZ, and the Attorney General has complained to a court that the Foundation did not do ABC and did do XYZ in violation of the law. Think penalties being imposed and business permits being revoked, not people going to jail.So in a civil suit, the complainant is the person who files the complaint to the court. In addition to complaining that the defendant(s) did something wrong, the complainant asks the court to do something about it. In this case, the AG has asked the NY Supreme Court to freeze the Foundation’s assets, dissolve the Foundation (i.e. the not-for-profit death penalty), fine the Trumps for the benefits they accreted by breaking the Not-For-Profit Corporation Law, and ban the various Trumps from running New York charities for various lengths of time.And one last thing: the terms “non-profit” and “not-for-profit” can be used interchangeably. A non-profit is just a kind of corporation with some extra rules on it: it’s not allowed to pay dividends to its shareholders, for example. (More on that below.) A charity is a specific kind of non-profit corporation in New York; not all non-profits are charities, but all charities are non-profits. Okay Let’s Do ThisIn the first ten paragraphs of the complaint, the AG sets the stage. The Trump Foundation has been under investigation since June 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign. The AG says it has discovered “over a decade of persistent violations without any oversight, to the benefit of Trump’s own personal, political, and business interests.” (As the AG is the New York State entity actually responsible for oversight of charities, this veers perilously close to a self-own.)Anyway, that last bit about “Trump’s own benefit” is no small problem, because charities in New York are given a special benefit in exchange for some of those rules I mentioned above. For example, charities don’t have to pay sales or income taxes, and people who give charities money get to deduct that money from their income when doing their own taxes. That’s a pretty big state-created incentive for other folks to give money to charities. And in exchange for those benefits, charities are supposed to put their money toward the public interest in one fashion or another. The definition of “public interest” is pretty forgiving: there are public education charities, there are public health charities, and so on.The important thing is that once money is donated to a charity, that money becomes a charitable asset, and the charity can either donate the charitable asset to another charity, or it can take the money and use it for some sort of charitable purpose. The Red Cross accepts donations, and then it turns around and donates some of that money to local charities when disasters strike. There’s a little wiggle room here: for example, the Red Cross is allowed to pay a for-profit company to rent office space, and they can buy pens from the for-profit company Staples. But note the person running the Red Cross can’t rent out his garage as office space to the Red Cross, or sell his favorite pen to the Red Cross for a million dollars. That would be using the Red Cross’s charitable assets to personally benefit the people running it. Huge problem there.The ChargesBut it’s more than just “hey, the Trumps weren’t very charitable with their charity’s assets.” Specifically, the AG alleges the defendants are responsible for: Making numerous false statements in their annual filings; Engaging in repeated self-dealing, where money donated to the Foundation was used to enrich the people running the Foundation; Wasting charitable assets, where the Foundation used money donated to the Foundation for non-charitable purposes; Violating the Internal Revenue Code’s prohibition on charities making political expenditures; Violating the Foundation’s Certificate of Incorporation.For all of these, the AG seeks to dissolve the Foundation, and to require the Trumps to pay back all their ill-gotten gains from self-dealing, plus a 100% penalty. Also, the Trumps could be banned from serving on the Boards of Directors of other New York State nonprofits for a number of years.That bit about Certificates of Incorporation is important; back in the 19th century, the legal system thought that corporations were dangerous vehicles that con men would abuse to rob the public. (Thank goodness they were wrong!) One of the first measures devised to keep corporations honest was requiring them to have a corporate purpose. Anyone forming a corporation had to explain what the thing was being formed to do. Some examples of a corporate purpose: buying and selling land in Upstate New York, owning and operating shoe factories, etc.These days, Certificates of Incorporation almost always describe the corporate purpose in the broadest possible terms, such as “to take any action for which it is legal that corporations in this State take.” That’s because corporations taking any actions in conflict their corporate purpose can have those actions voided by a court. Repeatedly having your corporation do something prohibited by its corporate purpose shows the court that you’re not the kind of person who ought to be trusted with a corporation.The Trump Foundation, as a nonprofit corporation, was formed in accordance with the language of the Internal Revenue Code for nonprofits, §501(c)(3): “exclusively for charitable, religious, scientific, literary or educational purposes either directly or by contributions to other nonprofits.” In addition, the corporate purpose explained that “no part of the property […] of the corporation shall be diverted in any manner directly or indirectly or otherwise inure to the benefit of any member, trustee, director or officer of the corporation or any private individual” and likewise forbids the Foundation from engaging in any political activity.But the Foundation apparently did all of those things the corporate purpose promised they wouldn’t do. That’s going to be a big problem.The LawsIn paragraphs 11 to 24, the AG’s complaint covers the relevant state laws. There are a lot of them, because the Trump Foundation is alleged to have broken enough laws to be one heck of a law school exam. Here’s the short version:Charities cannot distribute any part of their income to directors or officers of the corporation. (¶ 13) New York State Law forbids charities from self-dealing to the owner or their family. (¶ 14) Directors have to act in good faith and diligence. That means, at an absolute bare minimum, meeting once a year to talk about what the corporation has been doing and how much money it has left over, etc. (¶18)Later in the complaint, the Attorney General cites nine specific laws and rules the corporation violated, by: Having conflicts of interest per the NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 202(a) Participating in political campaigns per the Federal Internal Revenue Code §501(c)(3) Participating in political campaigns and engaging in self-dealing per § 406 of the NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law and 8-1.8 of the NYS Estates, Powers, and Trusts Law Letting assets, income, or profit inure to benefit of officer or director of charity per NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 102(5) Directors skipping the required annual meeting to review a report on the activities of the charity per NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 519 Not having an investment policy for the charity’s assets per NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 552(f) Not having a conflicts of interest policy per NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 715-a Making material false statements to AG’s office per §§ 172 and 175 of the NYS Executive Law Charities soliciting donations not registering with AG’s Charities Bureau. § 172 of Article 7-A of the NYS Executive Law Any one of those things isn’t necessarily going to get your charity dissolved, but Trump and Foundation are accused of doing all of them, over the course of years and even decades. Dissolution, the remedy the AG suggests, is a corporate death penalty. A court forces the charity to give its assets away to charity and un-incorporates. In this case, dissolution isn’t much of a penalty, because the Foundation already tried to dissolve itself after some of these abuses came to light. However, in a fun wrinkle, New York State nonprofits trying to dissolve themselves need the permission of […] the Attorney General, and in the complaint at ¶117, the AG’s folks essentially say “FYI, we reported all this stuff to the IRS and FEC, and we won’t let you dissolve until they say how much they’re going to fine all of you.”The FactsBeginning in paragraph 25, the complaint gets into the specific facts the AG’s office uncovered during their investigation.The Foundation has no staff, so it uses the Trump Organization staff. (¶25) Remember that “Trump Organization” is the name for the umbrella company that owns the hundreds of companies that make up Donald Trump’s business holdings. Having Organization staff do work for the Foundation is not illegal per se, but the Trump Organization and the Foundation are two legally distinct entities. If Organization staff are directed to do work for the Foundation, that’s a donation from the Organization to the Foundation and ought to be reported as such. As we’ll see below, that’s the least of the Foundation’s accounting problems.New York State law requires charities to prepare an annual report concerning their activities and operations, and for that annual report to be presented to the Board …annually. As the Board hasn’t met since 1999, it seems vanishingly unlikely that this requirement has been met. (¶26) The Attorney General isn’t going to dissolve a corporation for failing to meet this requirement, but this throws fuel on the fire. The adults were asleep at the wheel.Since July 2014, every charity in NY has been required to adopt a conflict of interest policy, defining conflicts of interest, announcing the charity’s policy on avoiding them, mandating conflict of interest reports by employees, describing what the GC and Board will do to prevent such conflicts, and what happens when an employee violates that policy. The Trump Foundation has no such policy. (¶29) The Foundation is also required to have an investment policy as of 2010, but it doesn’t have one of those, either. The AG dings them for failing to earn any interest on their substantial cash holdings. (¶32)The Iowa StuffIndividually, those are all relatively minor violations. Collectively, those are a recipe for getting slapped with a stiff fine and having your charity shut down. What you could see real, criminal repercussions for is the next bit: the Foundation allowed itself to be absorbed into the Donald Trump 2016 campaign, operating as an arm of Trump’s Political Action Committee in violation of State and Federal law and outside of the Foundation’s corporate purpose.Trump’s PAC planned, organized, and financed a charity fundraiser in January 2016, and asked the Foundation to participate in it. The charity fundraiser raised about $5.6m in donations, half of which went directly to non-Trump charities, and the other half went to the Foundation. Then the Foundation asked one of Trump’s campaign manager how to distribute the money. That manager, Corey Lewandowski, named a bunch of local Iowa Veterans groups and asked the Foundation to donate just before the Iowa caucuses for maximum political impact. If the guy running the Political Action Committee asks you to take an action for the purposes of helping a politician, it’s hard to argue that you’re following that “no politics” rule.To make matters worse, the campaign and the Foundation were hopelessly intertwined in the use of the donated funds. The Foundation did donate their half of the $5.6 million, but they held a bunch of public events in which the Foundation handed out giant novelty-sized checks for $100k with Trump campaign slogans and logos on them. Again, the Foundation is a completely separate legal entity from the campaign, and shouldn’t be participating at all in any politics ever, period. During the Iowa Caucus, Trump himself talked about how his poll numbers were going up because of the highly-publicized charitable donations. By May, Trump had moved on to bragging at campaign rallies about how much he’d given to charities.Every single charity that received money from the Foundation was selected by the campaign; that’s a big problem. As ¶58 of the complaint explains, this: “provided Mr. Trump and the Campaign a means to take credit at campaign rallies, press briefings, and on the Internet, for gifts to veterans charities. The Foundation’s grants made Mr. Trump and the Campaign look charitable and increased the candidate’s profile to Republican primary voters and among important constituent groups.”The AG also notes that by the time the Iowa fundraiser took place, Trump had contributed only $250,000 to his campaign, but had loaned his PAC $17.5 million. That $2.8m is actually a campaign donation, because it’s a thing of value given to the Trump campaign. For all the free publicity Trump’s campaign got courtesy of his outrageous Tweets, this $2.8m is a relatively small drop in the bucket. However, accepting millions of dollars in illegal and unreported campaign donations is a crime. (One that the Federal Election Commission has already announced it won’t investigate lol)The AG’s complaint goes on to note that Donald Trump was acutely aware of the prohibition on charities’ political activities and related party transactions, because Trump personally signed the Foundation’s tax returns. On those tax returns, he signed—under penalties of perjury—IRS Forms 990 in which he attested that the Foundation did not engage in prohibited transactions with interested parties, and that the Foundation did not carry out prohibited political activity. In addition, in February 2016, shortly after the $2.8m fundraiser, Trump actually spoke out against that prohibition on charities participating in political campaigns. Ignorance of the law is no defense, but Trump is going to have a hard time pleading ignorance here regardless. (¶60)The Florida StuffThere’s a weird side-plot in the complaint, starting in ¶61, where the Foundation contributed $25k to a PAC supporting Florida AG Pam Bondi, but reported to the IRS that the donation was to a Kansas pro-life religious charity with a similar name. The pro-Bondi PAC was named “And Justice For All”, but the Kansas charity was named “Justice For All.” On the face of it, it seems like it might be an honest mistake.Except for the details in ¶¶64-65, where Trump Organization staff printed the email from a Bondi campaign staffer (with a PamBondi.com email address) who said something like ’thanks for committing to donate $25k to the Bondi effort’ Donald Trump personally signed that printout, and his signed copy was sent to the Trump Organization’s accounts payable department. Apparently, that’s how they authorized those sorts of things. When interviewed by the NY AG’s office, the Trump Organization staffer said she looked up “And Justice For All” in the IRS’s public records, and thought it was a Utah-based charity. (But what about the @PamBondi.com email address?) Therefore, she drafted the check and sent it to Trump for his signature. Nobody knows who sent the check.Also, there’s the whole part where it looks like Trump gave that $25k donation to Bondi so she would stop investigating his Trump University scam, because within weeks of that donation, the Florida AG’s office announced it wasn’t going to investigate Trump University. The timing is lousy at best, but there’s no paper trail documenting a quid pro quo, so we’ll just pretend this is a funny coincidence.There’s more Florida stuff, too: ¶72 lists hundreds of thousands of dollars of self-dealing where the Foundation buys stuff for Trump, advertises his businesses, or pays settlements when the Trump Organization is sued. (Paying off debts on behalf of someone else is legally indistinguishable from just giving them money to repay their own debts.) The Trump Organization repaid all the benefits they got from the illegal self-dealing—with interest—after the investigation started, but the AG’s still seeking penalties for the organization and the Trumps.Almost Done, I SwearPhew. That’s a lot of facts. Now that we’ve spent seventy-plus paragraphs learning about all the stuff the Trump Foundation did, the complaint lays out what was wrong with all that.All four Trumps are being sued for Breach of Fiduciary Duty and Waste. Fiduciary duty is when you have to act in the best interests of someone else. For example, if you go to a car dealership, the salespeople there don’t owe you a fiduciary duty to help you get a good deal. They can’t lie to you, and your state probably has certain consumer protection laws that make sure the salespeople have to tell you certain things, but there’s no fiduciary relationship between you and the salesperson. Now, if you have a lawyer, that’s a fiduciary relationship; your lawyer has to do what’s best for you, whether or not that makes the lawyer the most money. The Board of Directors of a corporation owe their company a fiduciary duty to do what’s best for the corporation. Because the Trumps wasted the assets of the Foundation, they breached the fiduciary duty Directors owe their charities.Similarly, all four Trumps are being sued for failure to properly administer charitable assets and waste. It’s a bad idea for directors to breach their fiduciary duty by carelessly spending the charity’s money, but breaking the law when administering charitable assets is an extra bad idea.Donald Trump is also being personally sued for his illegal related-party transactions. He personally signed off on the use of Foundation money to enrich himself and his family. That’s a violation of New York State law. While I mentioned above that the Organization has already paid back its ill-gotten gains, the AG has asked the court for an addition 100% penalty: every dollar the Foundation misspent could be a dollar the Trumps are fined.The most comprehensive bit is the fourth cause of action: the Foundation is being sued for exceeding its authority and Donald Trump is being sued in his personal capacity for causing his charity to exceed its authority. That’s all laid out in those nine bullet points about two thousand words ago. Repeatedly abusing the laws favoring charities makes every other violation in this complaint much worse; this is why the court is going to shut down and fine the Trumps lots and lots of money.The fifth cause of action is kind of a funny one. In New York, the Attorney General is allowed to pretend they’re a member of any nonprofit’s board of directors for certain purposes. One of those purposes comes up here: the AG wants to pretend to be a Director in this case to take advantage of the law that lets any one Director petition the Supreme Court to dissolve their nonprofit without the consent of the other directors. Directors, whether real or pretend, can only do this if the other directors have acted illegally under the NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 1102(a)(2)(D).In the meantime, the AG’s seeking an injunction while the case moves forward; as the complaint describes it, “[t]here are no directors remaining who have demonstrated an understanding and respect for not-for-profit law and fiduciary duties. Court supervision is necessary to ensure that charitable assets are appropriately marshaled and distributed.” (¶123) There have never been a ton of assets in the Trump Foundation’s coffers, but this paragraph is trying to stop the misuse of charitable assets by having the court essentially freeze the Foundation’s bank accounts.Final ThoughtsThere’s a ton of illegality here. Like, if this were a law school exam, you’d sweat bullets trying to remember all the laws the Foundation broke. This blog post would have been a lot shorter if I listed what the Foundation did right, instead of listing what it did wrong.Oh, and the best thing about the Foundation wasting charitable assets over and over is that Donald Trump hasn’t given the Trump Foundation any money in a decade. It’s all other people’s money that he’s wasting.This trial begins on October 11, 2018. As I mentioned above, the FEC has already announced it’s not going to do anything about the Foundation’s illegal electioneering. The IRS still could, and unlike the NY Attorney General, the IRS brings criminal charges instead of a civil lawsuit.",
"content_html": "

Thursday, June 14 was President Trump’s birthday. Now, for my birthday, I got a notebook with special fountain pen-friendly paper because I live in Brooklyn, and they’ll kick me out if I don’t use an old-fashioned pen.

For the President’s birthday, he and his three favorite children found out they were the subjects of a lawsuit filed by the New York State Attorney General, Barbara Underwood. The AG is suing the four Trumps for their maladministration of the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation; as a bonus, the Foundation itself is a party to the lawsuit.

Now, first things first. This is a civil suit, not a criminal case. While the defendants (the four Trumps and the Foundation they run) are accused of breaking the New York State Not-For-Profit Corporation Law, nobody’s going to jail at the end of this trial. The law says non-profits have to do ABC and can’t do XYZ, and the Attorney General has complained to a court that the Foundation did not do ABC and did do XYZ in violation of the law. Think penalties being imposed and business permits being revoked, not people going to jail.

So in a civil suit, the complainant is the person who files the complaint to the court. In addition to complaining that the defendant(s) did something wrong, the complainant asks the court to do something about it. In this case, the AG has asked the NY Supreme Court to freeze the Foundation’s assets, dissolve the Foundation (i.e. the not-for-profit death penalty), fine the Trumps for the benefits they accreted by breaking the Not-For-Profit Corporation Law, and ban the various Trumps from running New York charities for various lengths of time.

And one last thing: the terms “non-profit” and “not-for-profit” can be used interchangeably. A non-profit is just a kind of corporation with some extra rules on it: it’s not allowed to pay dividends to its shareholders, for example. (More on that below.) A charity is a specific kind of non-profit corporation in New York; not all non-profits are charities, but all charities are non-profits.

Okay Let’s Do This

In the first ten paragraphs of the complaint, the AG sets the stage. The Trump Foundation has been under investigation since June 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign. The AG says it has discovered “over a decade of persistent violations without any oversight, to the benefit of Trump’s own personal, political, and business interests.” (As the AG is the New York State entity actually responsible for oversight of charities, this veers perilously close to a self-own.)

Anyway, that last bit about “Trump’s own benefit” is no small problem, because charities in New York are given a special benefit in exchange for some of those rules I mentioned above. For example, charities don’t have to pay sales or income taxes, and people who give charities money get to deduct that money from their income when doing their own taxes. That’s a pretty big state-created incentive for other folks to give money to charities. And in exchange for those benefits, charities are supposed to put their money toward the public interest in one fashion or another. The definition of “public interest” is pretty forgiving: there are public education charities, there are public health charities, and so on.

The important thing is that once money is donated to a charity, that money becomes a charitable asset, and the charity can either donate the charitable asset to another charity, or it can take the money and use it for some sort of charitable purpose. The Red Cross accepts donations, and then it turns around and donates some of that money to local charities when disasters strike. There’s a little wiggle room here: for example, the Red Cross is allowed to pay a for-profit company to rent office space, and they can buy pens from the for-profit company Staples. But note the person running the Red Cross can’t rent out his garage as office space to the Red Cross, or sell his favorite pen to the Red Cross for a million dollars. That would be using the Red Cross’s charitable assets to personally benefit the people running it. Huge problem there.

The Charges

But it’s more than just “hey, the Trumps weren’t very charitable with their charity’s assets.” Specifically, the AG alleges the defendants are responsible for:

Making numerous false statements in their annual filings;

Engaging in repeated self-dealing, where money donated to the Foundation was used to enrich the people running the Foundation;

Wasting charitable assets, where the Foundation used money donated to the Foundation for non-charitable purposes;

Violating the Internal Revenue Code’s prohibition on charities making political expenditures;

Violating the Foundation’s Certificate of Incorporation.

For all of these, the AG seeks to dissolve the Foundation, and to require the Trumps to pay back all their ill-gotten gains from self-dealing, plus a 100% penalty. Also, the Trumps could be banned from serving on the Boards of Directors of other New York State nonprofits for a number of years.

That bit about Certificates of Incorporation is important; back in the 19th century, the legal system thought that corporations were dangerous vehicles that con men would abuse to rob the public. (Thank goodness they were wrong!) One of the first measures devised to keep corporations honest was requiring them to have a corporate purpose. Anyone forming a corporation had to explain what the thing was being formed to do. Some examples of a corporate purpose: buying and selling land in Upstate New York, owning and operating shoe factories, etc.

These days, Certificates of Incorporation almost always describe the corporate purpose in the broadest possible terms, such as “to take any action for which it is legal that corporations in this State take.” That’s because corporations taking any actions in conflict their corporate purpose can have those actions voided by a court. Repeatedly having your corporation do something prohibited by its corporate purpose shows the court that you’re not the kind of person who ought to be trusted with a corporation.

The Trump Foundation, as a nonprofit corporation, was formed in accordance with the language of the Internal Revenue Code for nonprofits, §501(c)(3): “exclusively for charitable, religious, scientific, literary or educational purposes either directly or by contributions to other nonprofits.” In addition, the corporate purpose explained that “no part of the property […] of the corporation shall be diverted in any manner directly or indirectly or otherwise inure to the benefit of any member, trustee, director or officer of the corporation or any private individual” and likewise forbids the Foundation from engaging in any political activity.

But the Foundation apparently did all of those things the corporate purpose promised they wouldn’t do. That’s going to be a big problem.

The Laws

In paragraphs 11 to 24, the AG’s complaint covers the relevant state laws. There are a lot of them, because the Trump Foundation is alleged to have broken enough laws to be one heck of a law school exam. Here’s the short version:

Charities cannot distribute any part of their income to directors or officers of the corporation. (¶ 13) New York State Law forbids charities from self-dealing to the owner or their family. (¶ 14) Directors have to act in good faith and diligence. That means, at an absolute bare minimum, meeting once a year to talk about what the corporation has been doing and how much money it has left over, etc. (¶18)

Later in the complaint, the Attorney General cites nine specific laws and rules the corporation violated, by:

Having conflicts of interest per the NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 202(a)

Participating in political campaigns per the Federal Internal Revenue Code §501(c)(3)

Participating in political campaigns and engaging in self-dealing per § 406 of the NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law and 8-1.8 of the NYS Estates, Powers, and Trusts Law

Letting assets, income, or profit inure to benefit of officer or director of charity per NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 102(5)

Directors skipping the required annual meeting to review a report on the activities of the charity per NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 519

Not having an investment policy for the charity’s assets per NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 552(f)

Not having a conflicts of interest policy per NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 715-a

Making material false statements to AG’s office per §§ 172 and 175 of the NYS Executive Law

Charities soliciting donations not registering with AG’s Charities Bureau. § 172 of Article 7-A of the NYS Executive Law

Any one of those things isn’t necessarily going to get your charity dissolved, but Trump and Foundation are accused of doing all of them, over the course of years and even decades. Dissolution, the remedy the AG suggests, is a corporate death penalty. A court forces the charity to give its assets away to charity and un-incorporates. In this case, dissolution isn’t much of a penalty, because the Foundation already tried to dissolve itself after some of these abuses came to light. However, in a fun wrinkle, New York State nonprofits trying to dissolve themselves need the permission of […] the Attorney General, and in the complaint at ¶117, the AG’s folks essentially say “FYI, we reported all this stuff to the IRS and FEC, and we won’t let you dissolve until they say how much they’re going to fine all of you.”

The Facts

Beginning in paragraph 25, the complaint gets into the specific facts the AG’s office uncovered during their investigation.

The Foundation has no staff, so it uses the Trump Organization staff. (¶25) Remember that “Trump Organization” is the name for the umbrella company that owns the hundreds of companies that make up Donald Trump’s business holdings. Having Organization staff do work for the Foundation is not illegal per se, but the Trump Organization and the Foundation are two legally distinct entities. If Organization staff are directed to do work for the Foundation, that’s a donation from the Organization to the Foundation and ought to be reported as such. As we’ll see below, that’s the least of the Foundation’s accounting problems.

New York State law requires charities to prepare an annual report concerning their activities and operations, and for that annual report to be presented to the Board …annually. As the Board hasn’t met since 1999, it seems vanishingly unlikely that this requirement has been met. (¶26) The Attorney General isn’t going to dissolve a corporation for failing to meet this requirement, but this throws fuel on the fire. The adults were asleep at the wheel.

Since July 2014, every charity in NY has been required to adopt a conflict of interest policy, defining conflicts of interest, announcing the charity’s policy on avoiding them, mandating conflict of interest reports by employees, describing what the GC and Board will do to prevent such conflicts, and what happens when an employee violates that policy. The Trump Foundation has no such policy. (¶29) The Foundation is also required to have an investment policy as of 2010, but it doesn’t have one of those, either. The AG dings them for failing to earn any interest on their substantial cash holdings. (¶32)

The Iowa Stuff

Individually, those are all relatively minor violations. Collectively, those are a recipe for getting slapped with a stiff fine and having your charity shut down. What you could see real, criminal repercussions for is the next bit: the Foundation allowed itself to be absorbed into the Donald Trump 2016 campaign, operating as an arm of Trump’s Political Action Committee in violation of State and Federal law and outside of the Foundation’s corporate purpose.

Trump’s PAC planned, organized, and financed a charity fundraiser in January 2016, and asked the Foundation to participate in it. The charity fundraiser raised about $5.6m in donations, half of which went directly to non-Trump charities, and the other half went to the Foundation. Then the Foundation asked one of Trump’s campaign manager how to distribute the money. That manager, Corey Lewandowski, named a bunch of local Iowa Veterans groups and asked the Foundation to donate just before the Iowa caucuses for maximum political impact. If the guy running the Political Action Committee asks you to take an action for the purposes of helping a politician, it’s hard to argue that you’re following that “no politics” rule.

To make matters worse, the campaign and the Foundation were hopelessly intertwined in the use of the donated funds. The Foundation did donate their half of the $5.6 million, but they held a bunch of public events in which the Foundation handed out giant novelty-sized checks for $100k with Trump campaign slogans and logos on them. Again, the Foundation is a completely separate legal entity from the campaign, and shouldn’t be participating at all in any politics ever, period. During the Iowa Caucus, Trump himself talked about how his poll numbers were going up because of the highly-publicized charitable donations. By May, Trump had moved on to bragging at campaign rallies about how much he’d given to charities.

Every single charity that received money from the Foundation was selected by the campaign; that’s a big problem. As ¶58 of the complaint explains, this:

“provided Mr. Trump and the Campaign a means to take credit at campaign rallies, press briefings, and on the Internet, for gifts to veterans charities. The Foundation’s grants made Mr. Trump and the Campaign look charitable and increased the candidate’s profile to Republican primary voters and among important constituent groups.”

The AG also notes that by the time the Iowa fundraiser took place, Trump had contributed only $250,000 to his campaign, but had loaned his PAC $17.5 million. That $2.8m is actually a campaign donation, because it’s a thing of value given to the Trump campaign. For all the free publicity Trump’s campaign got courtesy of his outrageous Tweets, this $2.8m is a relatively small drop in the bucket. However, accepting millions of dollars in illegal and unreported campaign donations is a crime. (One that the Federal Election Commission has already announced it won’t investigate lol)

The AG’s complaint goes on to note that Donald Trump was acutely aware of the prohibition on charities’ political activities and related party transactions, because Trump personally signed the Foundation’s tax returns. On those tax returns, he signed—under penalties of perjury—IRS Forms 990 in which he attested that the Foundation did not engage in prohibited transactions with interested parties, and that the Foundation did not carry out prohibited political activity. In addition, in February 2016, shortly after the $2.8m fundraiser, Trump actually spoke out against that prohibition on charities participating in political campaigns. Ignorance of the law is no defense, but Trump is going to have a hard time pleading ignorance here regardless. (¶60)

The Florida Stuff

There’s a weird side-plot in the complaint, starting in ¶61, where the Foundation contributed $25k to a PAC supporting Florida AG Pam Bondi, but reported to the IRS that the donation was to a Kansas pro-life religious charity with a similar name. The pro-Bondi PAC was named “And Justice For All”, but the Kansas charity was named “Justice For All.” On the face of it, it seems like it might be an honest mistake.

Except for the details in ¶¶64-65, where Trump Organization staff printed the email from a Bondi campaign staffer (with a PamBondi.com email address) who said something like ’thanks for committing to donate $25k to the Bondi effort’ Donald Trump personally signed that printout, and his signed copy was sent to the Trump Organization’s accounts payable department. Apparently, that’s how they authorized those sorts of things. When interviewed by the NY AG’s office, the Trump Organization staffer said she looked up “And Justice For All” in the IRS’s public records, and thought it was a Utah-based charity. (But what about the @PamBondi.com email address?) Therefore, she drafted the check and sent it to Trump for his signature. Nobody knows who sent the check.

Also, there’s the whole part where it looks like Trump gave that $25k donation to Bondi so she would stop investigating his Trump University scam, because within weeks of that donation, the Florida AG’s office announced it wasn’t going to investigate Trump University. The timing is lousy at best, but there’s no paper trail documenting a quid pro quo, so we’ll just pretend this is a funny coincidence.

There’s more Florida stuff, too: ¶72 lists hundreds of thousands of dollars of self-dealing where the Foundation buys stuff for Trump, advertises his businesses, or pays settlements when the Trump Organization is sued. (Paying off debts on behalf of someone else is legally indistinguishable from just giving them money to repay their own debts.) The Trump Organization repaid all the benefits they got from the illegal self-dealing—with interest—after the investigation started, but the AG’s still seeking penalties for the organization and the Trumps.

Almost Done, I Swear

Phew. That’s a lot of facts. Now that we’ve spent seventy-plus paragraphs learning about all the stuff the Trump Foundation did, the complaint lays out what was wrong with all that.

All four Trumps are being sued for Breach of Fiduciary Duty and Waste. Fiduciary duty is when you have to act in the best interests of someone else. For example, if you go to a car dealership, the salespeople there don’t owe you a fiduciary duty to help you get a good deal. They can’t lie to you, and your state probably has certain consumer protection laws that make sure the salespeople have to tell you certain things, but there’s no fiduciary relationship between you and the salesperson. Now, if you have a lawyer, that’s a fiduciary relationship; your lawyer has to do what’s best for you, whether or not that makes the lawyer the most money. The Board of Directors of a corporation owe their company a fiduciary duty to do what’s best for the corporation. Because the Trumps wasted the assets of the Foundation, they breached the fiduciary duty Directors owe their charities.

Similarly, all four Trumps are being sued for failure to properly administer charitable assets and waste. It’s a bad idea for directors to breach their fiduciary duty by carelessly spending the charity’s money, but breaking the law when administering charitable assets is an extra bad idea.

Donald Trump is also being personally sued for his illegal related-party transactions. He personally signed off on the use of Foundation money to enrich himself and his family. That’s a violation of New York State law. While I mentioned above that the Organization has already paid back its ill-gotten gains, the AG has asked the court for an addition 100% penalty: every dollar the Foundation misspent could be a dollar the Trumps are fined.

The most comprehensive bit is the fourth cause of action: the Foundation is being sued for exceeding its authority and Donald Trump is being sued in his personal capacity for causing his charity to exceed its authority. That’s all laid out in those nine bullet points about two thousand words ago. Repeatedly abusing the laws favoring charities makes every other violation in this complaint much worse; this is why the court is going to shut down and fine the Trumps lots and lots of money.

The fifth cause of action is kind of a funny one. In New York, the Attorney General is allowed to pretend they’re a member of any nonprofit’s board of directors for certain purposes. One of those purposes comes up here: the AG wants to pretend to be a Director in this case to take advantage of the law that lets any one Director petition the Supreme Court to dissolve their nonprofit without the consent of the other directors. Directors, whether real or pretend, can only do this if the other directors have acted illegally under the NYS Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 1102(a)(2)(D).

In the meantime, the AG’s seeking an injunction while the case moves forward; as the complaint describes it, “[t]here are no directors remaining who have demonstrated an understanding and respect for not-for-profit law and fiduciary duties. Court supervision is necessary to ensure that charitable assets are appropriately marshaled and distributed.” (¶123) There have never been a ton of assets in the Trump Foundation’s coffers, but this paragraph is trying to stop the misuse of charitable assets by having the court essentially freeze the Foundation’s bank accounts.

Final Thoughts

There’s a ton of illegality here. Like, if this were a law school exam, you’d sweat bullets trying to remember all the laws the Foundation broke. This blog post would have been a lot shorter if I listed what the Foundation did right, instead of listing what it did wrong.

Oh, and the best thing about the Foundation wasting charitable assets over and over is that Donald Trump hasn’t given the Trump Foundation any money in a decade. It’s all other people’s money that he’s wasting.

This trial begins on October 11, 2018. As I mentioned above, the FEC has already announced it’s not going to do anything about the Foundation’s illegal electioneering. The IRS still could, and unlike the NY Attorney General, the IRS brings criminal charges instead of a civil lawsuit.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/ny-attorney-general-trump-foundation/",
"date_published": "2018-06-30T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-06-30T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/measuring-bail/",
"title": "Measuring Bail",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Mai Nguyen measured how bail works in New York City, analyzing over 100,000 cases handled by the largest public defense organization in the State. When you’re indicted by a grand jury, you’re arraigned – taken to the court and asked by a judge how you plead. [We] found that how much bail you owe — and whether you owe it at all — can depend on who hears your case the day you’re arraigned. New York’s judges are assigned to arraignment shifts, hearing every case that comes into the court during that time. Because the assignments are random — judges hear cases solely based on when people are arrested and how busy the court is — we can identify whether defendants are being treated equally regardless of who hears their case. They are not. In New York City, when clients of The Legal Aid Society who were charged with a misdemeanor in 2017 entered their initial arraignment, they had anywhere between a 2 and 26 percent chance of the judge setting a cash bail, depending on which judge was randomly assigned to oversee the court that day. For felonies, the range was even wider: anywhere between 30 and 69 percent. Those not assigned bail are likely to be released without having to pay, which means getting arrested on the wrong day can have a major consequence: You are more than twice as likely to have to pay your way to freedom. Can’t find the money? You’re stuck in jail.There are a lot of interesting implications here. While I think the idea that the justice system’s imposition of bail is inequitable isn’t terribly controversial (in my circles, at least), seeing it quantified like this is striking. On the one hand, judges are people, and people aren’t identical. There will always be tougher judges and more lenient judges, so long as people are doing the job of setting bail after an arraignment.But on the other hand, this is a little like having instant replay for called strikes in baseball, or offsides calls in ice hockey. What’s striking isn’t the fact that umpires and referees get it wrong sometimes, it’s how often that happens and what that says about all the times these decisions were made before we could review them qualitatively or quantitatively.",
"content_html": "

Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Mai Nguyen measured how bail works in New York City, analyzing over 100,000 cases handled by the largest public defense organization in the State. When you’re indicted by a grand jury, you’re arraigned – taken to the court and asked by a judge how you plead.

[We] found that how much bail you owe — and whether you owe it at all — can depend on who hears your case the day you’re arraigned. New York’s judges are assigned to arraignment shifts, hearing every case that comes into the court during that time. Because the assignments are random — judges hear cases solely based on when people are arrested and how busy the court is — we can identify whether defendants are being treated equally regardless of who hears their case. They are not.

In New York City, when clients of The Legal Aid Society who were charged with a misdemeanor in 2017 entered their initial arraignment, they had anywhere between a 2 and 26 percent chance of the judge setting a cash bail, depending on which judge was randomly assigned to oversee the court that day. For felonies, the range was even wider: anywhere between 30 and 69 percent. Those not assigned bail are likely to be released without having to pay, which means getting arrested on the wrong day can have a major consequence: You are more than twice as likely to have to pay your way to freedom. Can’t find the money? You’re stuck in jail.

There are a lot of interesting implications here. While I think the idea that the justice system’s imposition of bail is inequitable isn’t terribly controversial (in my circles, at least), seeing it quantified like this is striking. On the one hand, judges are people, and people aren’t identical. There will always be tougher judges and more lenient judges, so long as people are doing the job of setting bail after an arraignment.

But on the other hand, this is a little like having instant replay for called strikes in baseball, or offsides calls in ice hockey. What’s striking isn’t the fact that umpires and referees get it wrong sometimes, it’s how often that happens and what that says about all the times these decisions were made before we could review them qualitatively or quantitatively.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/measuring-bail/",
"date_published": "2018-06-25T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-06-25T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/warrantless-searches-iphones/",
"title": "Warrantless Searches of iPhones",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "I enjoyed this piece from Riana Pfefferkorn, writing in NYU Law’s Just Security, on the implications of a forthcoming iPhone feature called “USB Restricted Mode” that blocks all connections to a computer if the phone hasn’t been unlocked in over an hour. Today, even if the police don’t know the passcode to unlock your phone, they can connect your phone to a special computer that will try all possible passcode combinations from 000000 to 999999 over the span of a few days. This fall, Apple will push an update to iPhones that disables that port, and makes it harder to break into a locked iPhone.As Pfefferkorn explains, the police don’t need a search warrant if there are what’s called “exigent circumstances” – and if the phone is about to lock everyone out of itself forever, Apple might be shooting itself in the foot: The 2014 Supreme Court case Riley v. California requires police to get a warrant before searching a smartphone seized from someone who’s been arrested. […] “If ‘the police are truly confronted with a “now or never” situation,’ … they may be able to rely on exigent circumstances to search the phone immediately,” the Court said. Id. at 2487 (citation omitted). DOJ could thus thread the needle by arguing that the mere possibility that USB Restricted Mode is enabled on a seized iPhone creates “a ‘now or never’ situation” necessitating the immediate use of Cellebrite or GrayKey without waiting for a warrant. Applied broadly to iPhones, this exception would swallow the Fourth Amendment’s general rule. The “we need to dump the phone ASAP just in case USB Restricted Mode is on” approach might fly in a one-off situation. But that uncertainty will probably be present most times police seize a locked iPhone. Under that logic, it would be OK to forensically search any iPhone immediately without a warrant, because there would always be exigent circumstances. That is not how an exception to a rule works. “Exigent circumstances” are supposed to be situational and case-specific. The DOJ’s own manual for electronic evidence search and seizure acknowledges as much: “in electronic device cases, as in all others, the existence of exigent circumstances is tied to the facts of the individual case.” Given that recognition, DOJ would be hard-pressed to adopt or defend a policy allowing warrantless searches of iPhones a priori in all instances on the rationale that every single time police seize an iPhone, they “are truly confronted with a ‘now or never’ situation” as Riley said. That is particularly so given the alternative ways that police, with a warrant, could get data from a locked, encrypted phone, as a recent law review article about Riley explains—for example, going to the relevant service provider and asking for cloud backups of the phone’s contents.The Fourth Amendment isn’t exactly my strong suit, so this was an extremely educational read.",
"content_html": "

I enjoyed this piece from Riana Pfefferkorn, writing in NYU Law’s Just Security, on the implications of a forthcoming iPhone feature called “USB Restricted Mode” that blocks all connections to a computer if the phone hasn’t been unlocked in over an hour. Today, even if the police don’t know the passcode to unlock your phone, they can connect your phone to a special computer that will try all possible passcode combinations from 000000 to 999999 over the span of a few days. This fall, Apple will push an update to iPhones that disables that port, and makes it harder to break into a locked iPhone.

As Pfefferkorn explains, the police don’t need a search warrant if there are what’s called “exigent circumstances” – and if the phone is about to lock everyone out of itself forever, Apple might be shooting itself in the foot:

The 2014 Supreme Court case Riley v. California requires police to get a warrant before searching a smartphone seized from someone who’s been arrested. […] “If ‘the police are truly confronted with a “now or never” situation,’ … they may be able to rely on exigent circumstances to search the phone immediately,” the Court said. Id. at 2487 (citation omitted). DOJ could thus thread the needle by arguing that the mere possibility that USB Restricted Mode is enabled on a seized iPhone creates “a ‘now or never’ situation” necessitating the immediate use of Cellebrite or GrayKey without waiting for a warrant.

Applied broadly to iPhones, this exception would swallow the Fourth Amendment’s general rule. The “we need to dump the phone ASAP just in case USB Restricted Mode is on” approach might fly in a one-off situation. But that uncertainty will probably be present most times police seize a locked iPhone. Under that logic, it would be OK to forensically search any iPhone immediately without a warrant, because there would always be exigent circumstances.

That is not how an exception to a rule works. “Exigent circumstances” are supposed to be situational and case-specific. The DOJ’s own manual for electronic evidence search and seizure acknowledges as much: “in electronic device cases, as in all others, the existence of exigent circumstances is tied to the facts of the individual case.” Given that recognition, DOJ would be hard-pressed to adopt or defend a policy allowing warrantless searches of iPhones a priori in all instances on the rationale that every single time police seize an iPhone, they “are truly confronted with a ‘now or never’ situation” as Riley said. That is particularly so given the alternative ways that police, with a warrant, could get data from a locked, encrypted phone, as a recent law review article about Riley explains—for example, going to the relevant service provider and asking for cloud backups of the phone’s contents.

The Fourth Amendment isn’t exactly my strong suit, so this was an extremely educational read.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/warrantless-searches-iphones/",
"date_published": "2018-06-23T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-06-23T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/own-golazo/",
"title": "Own Golazo",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Sam Rutherford in Gizmodo on how Spain’s Biggest Football App Reportedly Turned Fans Into Unwitting Narcs: The La Liga app, which is the official streaming app for Spain’s most popular football league, has reportedly been using the microphones on fans’ phones to root out unauthorized broadcasts of matches in public venues like bars and restaurants. It sounds exactly like the kind of surveillance people are afraid of when it comes to modern technology, but as is often the case, the La Liga app technically asks users in Spain for permission to access their mics, according to Spanish Website El Diario. After downloading the La Liga app, it presents Spanish users with two options: a standard terms-of-service agreement, and a second, opt-in permission that gives La Liga consent to activate your device’s mic and even turn on GPS to help pinpoint the location of unlicensed broadcasts. However, according to the report, the only way you’d know that is by reading the fine print that accompanies the permissions—which no one ever does. Even more troubling, it seems this behavior has been going on for a while, and only recently has been brought back to light thanks to Europe’s new GDPR online privacy laws.First, it’s nice that modern smartphone platforms have a structured permissions system through which users can grant—and deny—apps access to certain sensors on the phone. The app I use to take notes or write emails doesn’t need access to my GPS coordinates, for example. That was not always the case, and this is definitely an area where smartphone manufacturers have done a good job protecting their consumers.Second, it makes much more sense for the Googles and Facebooks of the world to offer this kind of surveillance as a service to copyright holders than for companies like La Liga to try to freelance this thing. While El Diario mentions the La Liga app has been downloaded more than 10 million times, that’s still a small fraction of the overall smartphone base.For example, YouTube scans uploaded videos for copyrighted content, but that might be a result of its tortured history with copyright holders as much as anything else. It’s unclear to me how the La Ligas of the world would convince Google to turn every Android phone into a copyright informant.",
"content_html": "

The La Liga app, which is the official streaming app for Spain’s most popular football league, has reportedly been using the microphones on fans’ phones to root out unauthorized broadcasts of matches in public venues like bars and restaurants. It sounds exactly like the kind of surveillance people are afraid of when it comes to modern technology, but as is often the case, the La Liga app technically asks users in Spain for permission to access their mics, according to Spanish Website El Diario.

After downloading the La Liga app, it presents Spanish users with two options: a standard terms-of-service agreement, and a second, opt-in permission that gives La Liga consent to activate your device’s mic and even turn on GPS to help pinpoint the location of unlicensed broadcasts. However, according to the report, the only way you’d know that is by reading the fine print that accompanies the permissions—which no one ever does. Even more troubling, it seems this behavior has been going on for a while, and only recently has been brought back to light thanks to Europe’s new GDPR online privacy laws.

First, it’s nice that modern smartphone platforms have a structured permissions system through which users can grant—and deny—apps access to certain sensors on the phone. The app I use to take notes or write emails doesn’t need access to my GPS coordinates, for example. That was not always the case, and this is definitely an area where smartphone manufacturers have done a good job protecting their consumers.

Second, it makes much more sense for the Googles and Facebooks of the world to offer this kind of surveillance as a service to copyright holders than for companies like La Liga to try to freelance this thing. While El Diario mentions the La Liga app has been downloaded more than 10 million times, that’s still a small fraction of the overall smartphone base.

For example, YouTube scans uploaded videos for copyrighted content, but that might be a result of its tortured history with copyright holders as much as anything else. It’s unclear to me how the La Ligas of the world would convince Google to turn every Android phone into a copyright informant.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/own-golazo/",
"date_published": "2018-06-17T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-06-17T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/stanford-prison-experiment/",
"title": "On the Stanford Prison Experiment",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Like just about everyone who took an Intro to Psychology course in college, I learned about Philip Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment” as a parable about the dangers of groupthink and the ease with which authority—real or imagined—led to the abuse of power. I didn’t know the experiment was fatally flawed until I read The Lifespan of a Lie by Ben Blum: Zimbardo, a young Stanford psychology professor, built a mock jail in the basement of Jordan Hall and stocked it with nine “prisoners,” and nine “guards,” all male, college-age respondents to a newspaper ad who were assigned their roles at random and paid a generous daily wage to participate. The senior prison “staff” consisted of Zimbardo himself and a handful of his students. The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but after Zimbardo’s girlfriend stopped by six days in and witnessed the conditions in the “Stanford County Jail,” she convinced him to shut it down. Since then, the tale of guards run amok and terrified prisoners breaking down one by one has become world-famous, a cultural touchstone that’s been the subject of books, documentaries, and feature films — even an episode of “Veronica Mars.” ​The way I learned it, the guard’s behavior was a natural byproduct of the prisoner/guard relationship. However: Once the simulation got underway, [The “warden,” undergrad student David] Jaffe explicitly corrected guards who weren’t acting tough enough, fostering exactly the pathological behavior that Zimbardo would later claim had arisen organically. “The guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a tough guard,” Jaffe told one such guard. “[H]opefully what will come out of this study is some very serious recommendations for reform… so that we can get on the media and into the press with it, and say ‘Now look at what this is really about.’ … [T]ry and react as you picture the pigs reacting.” Though most guards gave lackluster performances, some even going out of their way to do small favors for the prisoners, one in particular rose to the challenge: Dave Eshelman, whom experimenters nicknamed “John Wayne” for his Southern accent and inventive cruelty. But Eshelman, who had studied acting throughout high school and college, has always admitted that his accent was just as fake as Korpi’s breakdown. His overarching goal, as he told me in an interview, was simply to help the experiment succeed.I’m not a sociologist, and I don’t know that a double-blind experiment is the right approach here. (Though it’s fun to imagine a “prison” split in half by bars, and the people on each side are unsure whether they’re prisoners or guards.) But over and over in Blum’s examination of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the researchers seem to have pretty blatantly interfered with the process.And this isn’t just modern science second-guessing the research methods of yesteryear: Despite the Stanford prison experiment’s canonical status in intro psych classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm, unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be “tough,” nonetheless opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising about the experiment was how few guards did. “The authors believe it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists,” Fromm wrote. “It seems to me that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary.”For those of you keeping score at home, the silver lining here appears to be “the situation didn’t turn guards into monsters; some of the guards were monsters this whole time,” which is silver-ish at best. I’ll take it.",
"content_html": "

Like just about everyone who took an Intro to Psychology course in college, I learned about Philip Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment” as a parable about the dangers of groupthink and the ease with which authority—real or imagined—led to the abuse of power. I didn’t know the experiment was fatally flawed until I read The Lifespan of a Lie by Ben Blum:

Zimbardo, a young Stanford psychology professor, built a mock jail in the basement of Jordan Hall and stocked it with nine “prisoners,” and nine “guards,” all male, college-age respondents to a newspaper ad who were assigned their roles at random and paid a generous daily wage to participate. The senior prison “staff” consisted of Zimbardo himself and a handful of his students. The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but after Zimbardo’s girlfriend stopped by six days in and witnessed the conditions in the “Stanford County Jail,” she convinced him to shut it down. Since then, the tale of guards run amok and terrified prisoners breaking down one by one has become world-famous, a cultural touchstone that’s been the subject of books, documentaries, and feature films — even an episode of “Veronica Mars.” ​The way I learned it, the guard’s behavior was a natural byproduct of the prisoner/guard relationship. However:

“The guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a tough guard,” Jaffe told one such guard. “[H]opefully what will come out of this study is some very serious recommendations for reform… so that we can get on the media and into the press with it, and say ‘Now look at what this is really about.’ … [T]ry and react as you picture the pigs reacting.”

Though most guards gave lackluster performances, some even going out of their way to do small favors for the prisoners, one in particular rose to the challenge: Dave Eshelman, whom experimenters nicknamed “John Wayne” for his Southern accent and inventive cruelty. But Eshelman, who had studied acting throughout high school and college, has always admitted that his accent was just as fake as Korpi’s breakdown. His overarching goal, as he told me in an interview, was simply to help the experiment succeed.

I’m not a sociologist, and I don’t know that a double-blind experiment is the right approach here. (Though it’s fun to imagine a “prison” split in half by bars, and the people on each side are unsure whether they’re prisoners or guards.) But over and over in Blum’s examination of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the researchers seem to have pretty blatantly interfered with the process.

And this isn’t just modern science second-guessing the research methods of yesteryear:

Despite the Stanford prison experiment’s canonical status in intro psych classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review.

Famed psychologist Erich Fromm, unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be “tough,” nonetheless opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising about the experiment was how few guards did. “The authors believe it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists,” Fromm wrote. “It seems to me that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary.”

For those of you keeping score at home, the silver lining here appears to be “the situation didn’t turn guards into monsters; some of the guards were monsters this whole time,” which is silver-ish at best. I’ll take it.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/stanford-prison-experiment/",
"date_published": "2018-06-14T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-06-14T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/followup-san-bernardino-iphone/",
"title": "Followup on a San Bernardino iPhone",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Remember the San Bernardino shooters? The husband and wife team that walked into his office holiday party and opened fire with a pair of assault rifles, and were then shot to death by police after a brief car chase? Detectives recovered the husband’s work phone, an iPhone with full-disk encryption enabled.At the time, the FBI had a whole song and dance routine about how dangerous encryption was, and how companies like Apple needed to build the FBI a system to get keys to unlock any device at any time. But the FBI mishandled the phone in that investigation and made their own jobs a whole lot harder.As I wrote about it back then: Look, if local police in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere had screwed up this badly, we’d wonder why the FBI wasn’t entrusted with this. But the FBI made their jobs a lot harder; this can’t be their first time at the iPhone Evidence Rodeo, so how could they have locked themselves out of the phone? […] Sure is funny how the FBI was hilariously inept in their investigation, and now the only way they can get into the phone is by having Apple build a tool to circumvent its own security measures, right? After all, if you were the FBI, and you wanted a test case, this whole “real live radicalized Muslim terrorist committing an act of war on American soil with pipe bombs and assault rifles before dying in a glorious shootout with the police” thing would be, like, the perfect test case. It sure would be a shame if the traditional investigation went awry, and the only way to get access to the phone was filing a completely novel test case.That’s a pretty cynical take, I’ll admit. I more or less tiptoed up to the precipice of accusing certain members of the FBI of sabotaging their own investigation; it didn’t seem out of the question that the FBI was using that phone as ammunition in a broader war on encryption. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and the only backdoors in my phone are planted by the NSA. Ha ha(?).Well, earlier this year, the FBI’s Inspector General issued a report on the San Bernardino iPhone investigation. That report is not much kinder to the FBI than my blog post from 2016. Susan Landau, law professor at Tufts University and one of the preeminent experts on this topic, breaks it down for folks like you and I: For the FBI, the IG report brings some good news: No one deliberately withheld knowledge to prevent opening the locked iPhone. But that’s about the only positive revelation. The IG report chronicles foot dragging during the efforts to open the locked device and, in a critical instance, an aversion to finding a technological resolution of the issue outside of the court case. Above all, the IG report casts doubt on the argument that locked phones are “warrant-proof” devices preventing law enforcement from doing its job. The FBI’s failure to open the iPhone was a result of bureaucracy and slowdown. Two units of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division (OTD) were key to eventually unlocking the iPhone: the Cryptologic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU), which examines data on digital devices, working largely on criminal cases, and the Remote Operations Unit (ROU), which uses network exploitation techniques and appears to work largely in classified cases. […]The CEAU and ROU weren’t communicating about this matter, but once they did, things moved pretty quickly: The ROU chief reached out to his vendors, and on March 16, 2016, discovered that one of them was already 90 percent of the way toward a solution. At the FBI’s request, the vendor reallocated resources, moving work on opening the iPhone “to the ‘front burner.’” A month later, a vendor demonstrated a solution to the FBI, and the court conflict between Apple and the FBI was over. Opening the locked iPhone should have been a good within the FBI. But that was not the view held by the CEAU chief; he apparently asked the ROU chief, “Why did you do that for?” The CEAU chief told the Inspector General “after the outside vendor came forward, the CEAU chief became frustrated that the case against Apple could no longer go forward.” That’s a striking story. We have the FBI director testifying—and U.S. attorneys submitting a motion operating of of the same premise—that only Apple could unlock this terrorist’s phone. But it seems that what was really going on, at least on the part of some FBI investigators, was an unwillingness to really try.Boy, that sure sounds like what privacy experts were publicly worried about back in 2016, doesn’t it?",
"content_html": "

Remember the San Bernardino shooters? The husband and wife team that walked into his office holiday party and opened fire with a pair of assault rifles, and were then shot to death by police after a brief car chase? Detectives recovered the husband’s work phone, an iPhone with full-disk encryption enabled.

At the time, the FBI had a whole song and dance routine about how dangerous encryption was, and how companies like Apple needed to build the FBI a system to get keys to unlock any device at any time. But the FBI mishandled the phone in that investigation and made their own jobs a whole lot harder.

Look, if local police in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere had screwed up this badly, we’d wonder why the FBI wasn’t entrusted with this. But the FBI made their jobs a lot harder; this can’t be their first time at the iPhone Evidence Rodeo, so how could they have locked themselves out of the phone? […] Sure is funny how the FBI was hilariously inept in their investigation, and now the only way they can get into the phone is by having Apple build a tool to circumvent its own security measures, right?

After all, if you were the FBI, and you wanted a test case, this whole “real live radicalized Muslim terrorist committing an act of war on American soil with pipe bombs and assault rifles before dying in a glorious shootout with the police” thing would be, like, the perfect test case. It sure would be a shame if the traditional investigation went awry, and the only way to get access to the phone was filing a completely novel test case.

That’s a pretty cynical take, I’ll admit. I more or less tiptoed up to the precipice of accusing certain members of the FBI of sabotaging their own investigation; it didn’t seem out of the question that the FBI was using that phone as ammunition in a broader war on encryption. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and the only backdoors in my phone are planted by the NSA. Ha ha(?).

Well, earlier this year, the FBI’s Inspector General issued a report on the San Bernardino iPhone investigation. That report is not much kinder to the FBI than my blog post from 2016. Susan Landau, law professor at Tufts University and one of the preeminent experts on this topic, breaks it down for folks like you and I:

For the FBI, the IG report brings some good news: No one deliberately withheld knowledge to prevent opening the locked iPhone. But that’s about the only positive revelation. The IG report chronicles foot dragging during the efforts to open the locked device and, in a critical instance, an aversion to finding a technological resolution of the issue outside of the court case. Above all, the IG report casts doubt on the argument that locked phones are “warrant-proof” devices preventing law enforcement from doing its job.

The FBI’s failure to open the iPhone was a result of bureaucracy and slowdown. Two units of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division (OTD) were key to eventually unlocking the iPhone: the Cryptologic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU), which examines data on digital devices, working largely on criminal cases, and the Remote Operations Unit (ROU), which uses network exploitation techniques and appears to work largely in classified cases. […]

The CEAU and ROU weren’t communicating about this matter, but once they did, things moved pretty quickly:

The ROU chief reached out to his vendors, and on March 16, 2016, discovered that one of them was already 90 percent of the way toward a solution. At the FBI’s request, the vendor reallocated resources, moving work on opening the iPhone “to the ‘front burner.’” A month later, a vendor demonstrated a solution to the FBI, and the court conflict between Apple and the FBI was over.

Opening the locked iPhone should have been a good within the FBI. But that was not the view held by the CEAU chief; he apparently asked the ROU chief, “Why did you do that for?” The CEAU chief told the Inspector General “after the outside vendor came forward, the CEAU chief became frustrated that the case against Apple could no longer go forward.”

That’s a striking story. We have the FBI director testifying—and U.S. attorneys submitting a motion operating of of the same premise—that only Apple could unlock this terrorist’s phone. But it seems that what was really going on, at least on the part of some FBI investigators, was an unwillingness to really try.

Boy, that sure sounds like what privacy experts were publicly worried about back in 2016, doesn’t it?

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/followup-san-bernardino-iphone/",
"date_published": "2018-05-30T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-05-30T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/shell-game/",
"title": "Shell Game",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "I really miss the days when there wasn’t a whole month’s worth of news crammed into a week. Last week, the first details of Michael Cohen’s essential(?) consulting business have been leaked into the public. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically illegal about selling information you have into the mindset of the most powerful person in the world; Cohen’s allowed to shop his thoughts on President Trump to whomever he likes. If your old boss became the President, you could charge AT&T a million dollars to answer their questions about your boss’s favorite model of phone, and what you know about his thoughts on 5G. But it seems some of those shoppers “hired” Cohen awfully soon after Trump tweeted vague threats to upend their industries, which looks a little shady.More interesting than Cohen’s naked profiteering on the margins is what he probably knows about the heart of the Trump Organization. There were two stories published, by Buzzfeed and USA Today, in January that I think will ultimately result in more indictments than Cohen’s consulting business. The first is by Thomas Frank in Buzzfeed, titled Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers: In 2008, as the Great Recession cooled real-estate markets, Trump could not make a payment on a bank loan that he had guaranteed personally for $40 million. Trump Entertainment Resorts, which owned the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, faced a $53 million payment to bondholders. Trump forestalled the bank payment by suing the lender, Deutsche Bank. The casino filed for bankruptcy in 2009. At the same time, Trump became financially entwined with Russians. In March 2008, a Russian billionaire paid Trump $95 million for a Palm Beach, Florida, estate that Trump had bought four years earlier for $41 million. Donald Trump Jr. told a Moscow real-estate conference in June 2008 that his father’s company, the Trump Organization, was planning to build condos and hotels in Russia. And he told a New York conference in September 2008, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”Got that? Trump flipped a property for $54m in profit the same year he owed a $53m payment to bondholders, which is also the same year as the Don Jr. quote above. One does wonder.But it’s not just the fact that there was “money pouring in.” It’s that shell companies hide the identifies of the buyers. Anyone can set up a company like this in an afternoon, and there are no laws requiring transparency into the real owners of the shell company. And there are tens of millions of dollars of transactions with shell companies during the years when Trump Jr. liked to brag about Russian money. Frank continues: Trump Jr. was executive vice president of development and acquisitions at the Trump Organization, which opened two major condo towers in early 2008 after a four-year lull. By the time Trump Jr. made his now-famous comment in September 2008, cash-paying shell companies had bought $43 million worth of condos at the Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago and at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. At a Trump-licensed condo building in Miami-Dade, cash-paying shell companies had bought $32 million worth of condos. During this time, the future president and his children also were heavily promoting the Trump SoHo, a lower Manhattan high-rise that has been mired in controversy. In his September 2008 remarks, Donald Jr. cited the project: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York.”And Nick Penzenstadler in USA Today reported earlier this year that most folks buying real estate from the President’s company are using shell companies to hide their identity: The trend toward Trump’s real estate buyers buyers obscuring their identities began around the time he won the Republican nomination, midway through 2016, according to USA TODAY’s analysis of every domestic real estate sale by one of his companies. In the two years before the nomination, 4% of Trump buyers utilized the tactic. In the year after, the rate skyrocketed to about 70%. USA TODAY’s tracking of sales shows the trend held firm through Trump’s first year in office. Profits from sales of those properties flow through a trust run by Trump’s sons. The president is the sole beneficiary of the trust and he can withdraw cash at any time.I understand some of the uproar about the not-hush-money portions of Cohen’s “consulting” business, but if I were looking to launder money or just bribe the President, I wouldn’t funnel the money through Cohen to do it. It seems much easier to set up a shell company and simply buy a $2 million condo for $10 million.",
"content_html": "

I really miss the days when there wasn’t a whole month’s worth of news crammed into a week. Last week, the first details of Michael Cohen’s essential(?) consulting business have been leaked into the public. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically illegal about selling information you have into the mindset of the most powerful person in the world; Cohen’s allowed to shop his thoughts on President Trump to whomever he likes. If your old boss became the President, you could charge AT&T a million dollars to answer their questions about your boss’s favorite model of phone, and what you know about his thoughts on 5G. But it seems some of those shoppers “hired” Cohen awfully soon after Trump tweeted vague threats to upend their industries, which looks a little shady.

More interesting than Cohen’s naked profiteering on the margins is what he probably knows about the heart of the Trump Organization. There were two stories published, by Buzzfeed and USA Today, in January that I think will ultimately result in more indictments than Cohen’s consulting business. The first is by Thomas Frank in Buzzfeed, titled Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers:

In 2008, as the Great Recession cooled real-estate markets, Trump could not make a payment on a bank loan that he had guaranteed personally for $40 million. Trump Entertainment Resorts, which owned the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, faced a $53 million payment to bondholders. Trump forestalled the bank payment by suing the lender, Deutsche Bank. The casino filed for bankruptcy in 2009.

At the same time, Trump became financially entwined with Russians. In March 2008, a Russian billionaire paid Trump $95 million for a Palm Beach, Florida, estate that Trump had bought four years earlier for $41 million. Donald Trump Jr. told a Moscow real-estate conference in June 2008 that his father’s company, the Trump Organization, was planning to build condos and hotels in Russia. And he told a New York conference in September 2008, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Got that? Trump flipped a property for $54m in profit the same year he owed a $53m payment to bondholders, which is also the same year as the Don Jr. quote above. One does wonder.

But it’s not just the fact that there was “money pouring in.” It’s that shell companies hide the identifies of the buyers. Anyone can set up a company like this in an afternoon, and there are no laws requiring transparency into the real owners of the shell company. And there are tens of millions of dollars of transactions with shell companies during the years when Trump Jr. liked to brag about Russian money. Frank continues:

Trump Jr. was executive vice president of development and acquisitions at the Trump Organization, which opened two major condo towers in early 2008 after a four-year lull. By the time Trump Jr. made his now-famous comment in September 2008, cash-paying shell companies had bought $43 million worth of condos at the Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago and at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas.

At a Trump-licensed condo building in Miami-Dade, cash-paying shell companies had bought $32 million worth of condos.

During this time, the future president and his children also were heavily promoting the Trump SoHo, a lower Manhattan high-rise that has been mired in controversy. In his September 2008 remarks, Donald Jr. cited the project: “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York.”

The trend toward Trump’s real estate buyers buyers obscuring their identities began around the time he won the Republican nomination, midway through 2016, according to USA TODAY’s analysis of every domestic real estate sale by one of his companies.

In the two years before the nomination, 4% of Trump buyers utilized the tactic. In the year after, the rate skyrocketed to about 70%. USA TODAY’s tracking of sales shows the trend held firm through Trump’s first year in office.

Profits from sales of those properties flow through a trust run by Trump’s sons. The president is the sole beneficiary of the trust and he can withdraw cash at any time.

I understand some of the uproar about the not-hush-money portions of Cohen’s “consulting” business, but if I were looking to launder money or just bribe the President, I wouldn’t funnel the money through Cohen to do it. It seems much easier to set up a shell company and simply buy a $2 million condo for $10 million.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/shell-game/",
"date_published": "2018-05-29T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-05-29T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/introduction-surveillance-capitalism/",
"title": "Introduction to Surveillance Capitalism",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Maciej Cegłowski is one of the best writers about the internet you can read. In April 2017, he gave a talk titled Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance that you should watch or read in its entirety. At base, the talk is about Surveillance Capitalism, which is the economic basis of the Internet. As Cegłowski puts it, “every interaction with a computing device leaves a data trail, and whole industries exist to consume this data.”Here’s his bit about the advertising industry: Ads are served indirectly, based on real-time auctions conducted when the page is served by a maze of intermediaries. This highly automated market is a magnet for fraud, so much of the complexity of modern ad technology consists of additional (and invasive) tracking. Curiously, despite years of improvements in the technology, and the amount of user data available to the ad networks, online advertising isn’t targeted all that well. You can convince yourself of this by turning off your ad blocker for a week. In a recent example, Chase stopped serving ads to 95% of its websites and saw no measurable difference in ‘engagement’ metrics. Many advertisers are simply not equipped to use the full panoply of surveillance options. More importantly, adversaries have become very good at gaming real-time ad marketplaces, which introduces noise into the system. An uncharitable but accurate description of online advertising in 2017 is “robots serving ads to robots”. A considerable fraction (only Google and Facebook have the numbers) of the money sloshing around goes to scammers.So robots bid against one another for the right to show ads on pages, and other robots visit pages with ads to drive up the value of the pages with ads on them in the first place. Of all of humanity’s creations, this quasi-ecosystem has to be one of the most baffling.As an aside, even the biggest and ostensibly best surveillance companies still haven’t gotten the hang of this stuff. Facebook recently showed me that three of my friends had recently visited New York City, and encouraged me to visit New York City as well. Somehow, Facebook’s system failed to account for the fact that all three of those friends—not to mention myself—live in New York City.That’s not to say that this demonstrates Facebook is somehow lousy at surveillance. This is just a funny outlier in the midst of surveillance so scary-good that it’s hard to say with certainty that Facebook isn’t listening to the conversations you have in front of your phone. Heck, IBM’s Watson answered a Jeopardy question in the “U.S. Cities” category with “Toronto” en route to crushing its human competitors. The more capable these systems get, the funnier the outliers.But AlsoThe outliers serve a second purpose, according to Cegłowski. This is one of his best arguments: The relative ineffectiveness of targeted advertising creates pressure to collect more data. Ad networks are not just evaluated by their current ad revenue, but by expectations about what new ad formats will make possible in the future, in a dynamic I’ve called “investor storytime”. The more poorly current ads perform, the more room there is to tell convincing stories about future advertising technology, which of course will require new forms of surveillance. This trick of constantly selling the next version of the ad economy works because new ad formats really do have better engagement. Advertising is like a disease: it takes people time to develop immunity and resistance. Even the first banner ad had a 70% click through rate.So long as advertising is the economic engine of the internet, the march toward ever more invasive surveillance technologies and ever creepier ads is inexorable. ​Toward that end, Cegłowski shares some meditations on what might make the ads of the future creepy in a way that’s hard to really wrap your head around. Advertising will be powered by artificial intelligences, but AIs are inherently alien, mostly because we don’t understand enough about brains to be able to reinvent them. In the past, we assumed that when machines reached near-human performance in tasks like image recognition, it would be thanks to fundamental breakthroughs into the nature of cognition. We would be able to lift the lid on the human mind and see all the little gears turning. What’s happened instead is odd. We found a way to get terrific results by combining fairly simple math with enormous data sets. But this discovery did not advance our understanding. The mathematical techniques used in machine learning don’t have a complex, intelligible internal structure we can reason about. Like our brains, they are a wild, interconnected tangle.The result is that the algorithms that decide what we see (ads and contents) are smarter than us in some ways, and dangerously unfit to decide how to filter the word for us in other ways. The future’s going to be weird!",
"content_html": "

Maciej Cegłowski is one of the best writers about the internet you can read. In April 2017, he gave a talk titled Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance that you should watch or read in its entirety. At base, the talk is about Surveillance Capitalism, which is the economic basis of the Internet. As Cegłowski puts it, “every interaction with a computing device leaves a data trail, and whole industries exist to consume this data.”

Here’s his bit about the advertising industry:

Ads are served indirectly, based on real-time auctions conducted when the page is served by a maze of intermediaries. This highly automated market is a magnet for fraud, so much of the complexity of modern ad technology consists of additional (and invasive) tracking.

Curiously, despite years of improvements in the technology, and the amount of user data available to the ad networks, online advertising isn’t targeted all that well. You can convince yourself of this by turning off your ad blocker for a week. In a recent example, Chase stopped serving ads to 95% of its websites and saw no measurable difference in ‘engagement’ metrics.

Many advertisers are simply not equipped to use the full panoply of surveillance options. More importantly, adversaries have become very good at gaming real-time ad marketplaces, which introduces noise into the system. An uncharitable but accurate description of online advertising in 2017 is “robots serving ads to robots”. A considerable fraction (only Google and Facebook have the numbers) of the money sloshing around goes to scammers.

So robots bid against one another for the right to show ads on pages, and other robots visit pages with ads to drive up the value of the pages with ads on them in the first place. Of all of humanity’s creations, this quasi-ecosystem has to be one of the most baffling.

As an aside, even the biggest and ostensibly best surveillance companies still haven’t gotten the hang of this stuff. Facebook recently showed me that three of my friends had recently visited New York City, and encouraged me to visit New York City as well. Somehow, Facebook’s system failed to account for the fact that all three of those friends—not to mention myself—live in New York City.

That’s not to say that this demonstrates Facebook is somehow lousy at surveillance. This is just a funny outlier in the midst of surveillance so scary-good that it’s hard to say with certainty that Facebook isn’t listening to the conversations you have in front of your phone. Heck, IBM’s Watson answered a Jeopardy question in the “U.S. Cities” category with “Toronto” en route to crushing its human competitors. The more capable these systems get, the funnier the outliers.

But Also

The outliers serve a second purpose, according to Cegłowski. This is one of his best arguments:

The relative ineffectiveness of targeted advertising creates pressure to collect more data. Ad networks are not just evaluated by their current ad revenue, but by expectations about what new ad formats will make possible in the future, in a dynamic I’ve called “investor storytime”. The more poorly current ads perform, the more room there is to tell convincing stories about future advertising technology, which of course will require new forms of surveillance.

This trick of constantly selling the next version of the ad economy works because new ad formats really do have better engagement. Advertising is like a disease: it takes people time to develop immunity and resistance. Even the first banner ad had a 70% click through rate.

So long as advertising is the economic engine of the internet, the march toward ever more invasive surveillance technologies and ever creepier ads is inexorable. ​Toward that end, Cegłowski shares some meditations on what might make the ads of the future creepy in a way that’s hard to really wrap your head around. Advertising will be powered by artificial intelligences, but AIs are inherently alien, mostly because we don’t understand enough about brains to be able to reinvent them.

In the past, we assumed that when machines reached near-human performance in tasks like image recognition, it would be thanks to fundamental breakthroughs into the nature of cognition. We would be able to lift the lid on the human mind and see all the little gears turning.

What’s happened instead is odd. We found a way to get terrific results by combining fairly simple math with enormous data sets. But this discovery did not advance our understanding. The mathematical techniques used in machine learning don’t have a complex, intelligible internal structure we can reason about. Like our brains, they are a wild, interconnected tangle.

The result is that the algorithms that decide what we see (ads and contents) are smarter than us in some ways, and dangerously unfit to decide how to filter the word for us in other ways. The future’s going to be weird!

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/introduction-surveillance-capitalism/",
"date_published": "2018-05-23T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-05-23T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/very-little-gravitas-indeed/",
"title": "Very Little Gravitas Indeed",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "One of my favorite series on the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog is Abigail Nussbaum’s Political History of the Future, in which she analyzes the politics of science fiction settings. This bit from her essay on Iain M. Banks’s The Culture series is a wonderful introduction to something like Star Trek’s Federation, but simultaneously weirder and more realistic: The Culture wants for nothing, and yet it is defined by a profound need for meaning. The Culture is the most radically, anarchically free society imaginable, and yet it is governed by AIs (known as “Minds”) who make decisions at a speed and complexity that human citizens could never hope to match. The Culture is constitutionally peaceful, and yet it constructs ships and weapons platforms capable of dealing out death and destruction on a galactic scale. What’s more, the Culture’s covert operations wing, Special Circumstances, routinely interferes in the affairs of other societies, sometimes nudging them gently towards more equal, more benevolent forms of government, and sometimes orchestrating coups and civil wars in the hopes that these will lead to better results down the line. It can be hard to tell whether we’re meant to approve of the Culture or be horrified by it. Beyond that, it can be hard to tell whether the Culture is a utopian vision of the future, or a dystopian parody of the present.​Nussbaum’s personal blog has a decade-long series of reviews of the individual books in The Culture series, if you’re already familiar with the setting.Either way, don’t skip the link to the list of names which The Culture’s Minds give their spaceships. Whether or not superintelligent AIs are going to destroy humanity, I hope they have the decency to be as irreverent as the Minds are.",
"content_html": "

One of my favorite series on the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog is Abigail Nussbaum’s Political History of the Future, in which she analyzes the politics of science fiction settings. This bit from her essay on Iain M. Banks’s The Culture series is a wonderful introduction to something like Star Trek’s Federation, but simultaneously weirder and more realistic:

The Culture wants for nothing, and yet it is defined by a profound need for meaning. The Culture is the most radically, anarchically free society imaginable, and yet it is governed by AIs (known as “Minds”) who make decisions at a speed and complexity that human citizens could never hope to match. The Culture is constitutionally peaceful, and yet it constructs ships and weapons platforms capable of dealing out death and destruction on a galactic scale.

What’s more, the Culture’s covert operations wing, Special Circumstances, routinely interferes in the affairs of other societies, sometimes nudging them gently towards more equal, more benevolent forms of government, and sometimes orchestrating coups and civil wars in the hopes that these will lead to better results down the line. It can be hard to tell whether we’re meant to approve of the Culture or be horrified by it. Beyond that, it can be hard to tell whether the Culture is a utopian vision of the future, or a dystopian parody of the present.

​Nussbaum’s personal blog has a decade-long series of reviews of the individual books in The Culture series, if you’re already familiar with the setting.

Either way, don’t skip the link to the list of names which The Culture’s Minds give their spaceships. Whether or not superintelligent AIs are going to destroy humanity, I hope they have the decency to be as irreverent as the Minds are.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/very-little-gravitas-indeed/",
"date_published": "2018-05-19T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-05-19T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/trial-noor-salman/",
"title": "The Trial of Noor Salman",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Rachel Louise Snyder in the New Yorker last month, writing about The Trial of Noor Salman and Its Shocking Disregard for Survivors of Domestic Violence left me pretty rattled. If you’re unaware, Salman is the widow of the guy who murdered forty-nine people at the Pulse Nightclub in Miami in 2016. When Salman was initially arrested and questioned on suspicion of being an accomplice, her husband—who domestically abused her—was alive. But over the course of her twelve-hour interrogation, the F.B.I. let her know he’d been shot dead by the police. Salman entered the F.B.I. office believing herself the wife of an abuser, and learned that she was a widow. Suddenly, she no longer lived under the authoritarian rule of a man who watched grisly beheading videos on his phone while at work. Salman’s defense attorneys used very little of her history of abuse in their arguments, because the larger point for them was to convince jurors that she did not know of his plans before the attack unfolded. But from my viewpoint her victimhood was both entirely pertinent and shockingly disregarded by both the F.B.I. investigators and, later, by the federal prosecutors who chose to put her on trial. Law-enforcement officials are not always familiar with the control that abusers have over their victims. They frequently encounter the following scenario: responders are called to a scene of domestic violence in a home. When they arrive, often to their dismay and annoyance, the victim begins to scream at them to go away, to tell them they aren’t wanted, even to holler obscenities at them. This happens even when a victim’s physical injuries—black eyes, bloody wounds—are obvious. Police often interpret this behavior as evidence that the victim is mentally or emotionally unstable. But this behavior is a message not to law enforcement, but to the abuser. It says, “I know you will be here when they are gone. I am loyal even in the face of your violence.” It says, “Please don’t kill me when they are gone.”This left a crater in my heart. Ignorance is bliss, y’all.",
"content_html": "

Rachel Louise Snyder in the New Yorker last month, writing about The Trial of Noor Salman and Its Shocking Disregard for Survivors of Domestic Violence left me pretty rattled. If you’re unaware, Salman is the widow of the guy who murdered forty-nine people at the Pulse Nightclub in Miami in 2016. When Salman was initially arrested and questioned on suspicion of being an accomplice, her husband—who domestically abused her—was alive. But over the course of her twelve-hour interrogation, the F.B.I. let her know he’d been shot dead by the police.

Salman entered the F.B.I. office believing herself the wife of an abuser, and learned that she was a widow. Suddenly, she no longer lived under the authoritarian rule of a man who watched grisly beheading videos on his phone while at work. Salman’s defense attorneys used very little of her history of abuse in their arguments, because the larger point for them was to convince jurors that she did not know of his plans before the attack unfolded. But from my viewpoint her victimhood was both entirely pertinent and shockingly disregarded by both the F.B.I. investigators and, later, by the federal prosecutors who chose to put her on trial.

Law-enforcement officials are not always familiar with the control that abusers have over their victims. They frequently encounter the following scenario: responders are called to a scene of domestic violence in a home. When they arrive, often to their dismay and annoyance, the victim begins to scream at them to go away, to tell them they aren’t wanted, even to holler obscenities at them. This happens even when a victim’s physical injuries—black eyes, bloody wounds—are obvious. Police often interpret this behavior as evidence that the victim is mentally or emotionally unstable. But this behavior is a message not to law enforcement, but to the abuser. It says, “I know you will be here when they are gone. I am loyal even in the face of your violence.” It says, “Please don’t kill me when they are gone.”

This left a crater in my heart. Ignorance is bliss, y’all.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/trial-noor-salman/",
"date_published": "2018-05-18T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-05-18T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/adopted-across-ocean/",
"title": "Adopted Across the Ocean",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Kathryn Tolbert in the Washington Post: He searched for his Japanese birth mother. He found her — and the restaurant she had named after him. It began with a heart attack in the Pentagon parking lot in pre-dawn darkness. Air Force Col. Bruce Hollywood was on his way to work and found himself on the ground, thinking: “This is where it ends.” It took that heart attack in 2005 for Hollywood to set out to find his birth mother, something his adoptive mother, who had passed away, had repeatedly encouraged him to do. Before that, he said, he never felt something was missing. His adoption was not something he had reflected on much.I’m not giving anything away here, because the headline spoils the ending, but this part toward the end is unbearably cute. On that first visit, she didn’t want to let him out of her sight. When he went for a run, he came back and found her frantic with worry. The next morning, he snuck downstairs at 5 a.m. to go running, only to find her waiting, dressed in a track suit. Okay, he thought, I’ll go for a walk. She said, no, you run. And she rode a bicycle behind him. That became their morning ritual during the visit.I mean, come on.​",
"content_html": "

It began with a heart attack in the Pentagon parking lot in pre-dawn darkness. Air Force Col. Bruce Hollywood was on his way to work and found himself on the ground, thinking: “This is where it ends.” It took that heart attack in 2005 for Hollywood to set out to find his birth mother, something his adoptive mother, who had passed away, had repeatedly encouraged him to do. Before that, he said, he never felt something was missing. His adoption was not something he had reflected on much.

I’m not giving anything away here, because the headline spoils the ending, but this part toward the end is unbearably cute.

On that first visit, she didn’t want to let him out of her sight. When he went for a run, he came back and found her frantic with worry. The next morning, he snuck downstairs at 5 a.m. to go running, only to find her waiting, dressed in a track suit. Okay, he thought, I’ll go for a walk. She said, no, you run. And she rode a bicycle behind him. That became their morning ritual during the visit.

I mean, come on.​

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/adopted-across-ocean/",
"date_published": "2018-05-17T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-05-17T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/something-broken-every-single-possible-way/",
"title": "Something That Has Broken in Every Single Possible Way",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "The New Yorker’s Ben Taub has an amazing story in the New Yorker about a former CIA counterterrorism expert who joined his hometown police force. The spy turned cop’s name is Patrick Skinner, and he provides the story’s first and best pull quote: “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah. Just look what happened in Fallujah.”The story bounces back and forth from Skinner’s career in the CIA to his time patrolling the beat in Savannah, Georgia. I appreciate his take on the mismanagement of the War on Terror, but it’s Skinner’s views on the responsibility of police officers that really gets me. Here’s a bit toward the end, immediately after Officer Skinner uses his patrol car to drive a homeless woman to a Waffle House and buys her a hot meal: Back in the car, Skinner explained that part of his motivation in helping Norma Jeane was to prevent an emergency call, three hours later, of a homeless woman freezing to death. “Think of all the shit that went wrong in this country for Norma Jeane to be sitting in the car with us,” he said. Although schizophrenia affects a little more than one per cent of Americans, it’s a factor in a high percentage of police calls. A few hours earlier, Skinner had checked on a schizophrenic man who calls the police multiple times each night, reporting paranoid hallucinations; the department can never ignore a call, because he is the legal owner of a .357 Magnum revolver, and officers told me that he once tried to execute an intruder in his front yard. At times, Skinner feels as if the role of a police officer were to pick up the pieces of “something that has broken in every single possible way.” “A huge amount of what police actually do is support and service and problem-solving,” [one of the nation’s leading criminologists] David M. Kennedy told me. “And part of what’s so inside out is that most of that activity is not recognized.” Police officers are increasingly filling the gaps of a broken state. “They do it essentially on their own, usually without adequate training and preparation, often without the skills they need, and overwhelmingly without the resources and institutional connections that it would take to do those things well.” Twenty-seven hours after we left Norma Jeane at the Waffle House, another cop radioed in an E.M.S. call. A fifty-nine-year-old homeless woman, dressed in a Santa hat and a leopard-print jacket, was freezing to death.Read the rest of ​The Spy Who Came Home.",
"content_html": "

The New Yorker’s Ben Taub has an amazing story in the New Yorker about a former CIA counterterrorism expert who joined his hometown police force. The spy turned cop’s name is Patrick Skinner, and he provides the story’s first and best pull quote: “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah. Just look what happened in Fallujah.”

The story bounces back and forth from Skinner’s career in the CIA to his time patrolling the beat in Savannah, Georgia. I appreciate his take on the mismanagement of the War on Terror, but it’s Skinner’s views on the responsibility of police officers that really gets me. Here’s a bit toward the end, immediately after Officer Skinner uses his patrol car to drive a homeless woman to a Waffle House and buys her a hot meal:

Back in the car, Skinner explained that part of his motivation in helping Norma Jeane was to prevent an emergency call, three hours later, of a homeless woman freezing to death. “Think of all the shit that went wrong in this country for Norma Jeane to be sitting in the car with us,” he said. Although schizophrenia affects a little more than one per cent of Americans, it’s a factor in a high percentage of police calls. A few hours earlier, Skinner had checked on a schizophrenic man who calls the police multiple times each night, reporting paranoid hallucinations; the department can never ignore a call, because he is the legal owner of a .357 Magnum revolver, and officers told me that he once tried to execute an intruder in his front yard. At times, Skinner feels as if the role of a police officer were to pick up the pieces of “something that has broken in every single possible way.”

“A huge amount of what police actually do is support and service and problem-solving,” [one of the nation’s leading criminologists] David M. Kennedy told me. “And part of what’s so inside out is that most of that activity is not recognized.” Police officers are increasingly filling the gaps of a broken state. “They do it essentially on their own, usually without adequate training and preparation, often without the skills they need, and overwhelmingly without the resources and institutional connections that it would take to do those things well.”

Twenty-seven hours after we left Norma Jeane at the Waffle House, another cop radioed in an E.M.S. call. A fifty-nine-year-old homeless woman, dressed in a Santa hat and a leopard-print jacket, was freezing to death.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/something-broken-every-single-possible-way/",
"date_published": "2018-05-16T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-05-16T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/stories-behind-chinas-best-nba-nicknames/",
"title": "The Stories Behind China’s Best NBA Nicknames",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Nick Kapur in Deadspin rounds up The Stories Behind China’s Best NBA Nicknames: At their best, Chinese nicknames always seem to combine both affection and shade, producing monikers that both fans and haters can get behind. Thus Charles Barkley is called a fat pig, but he’s a flying fat pig (飞猪)—high praise, since the character for “flying” normally is reserved for players who take their game above the rim. It’s also a pun, since the character for “flying” sounds similar to the Chinese word for “fat.” Similarly, Joel Embiid is “the Great” (大帝), but there’s a hint of sarcasm that maybe his greatness is self-appointed and not yet earned. Manu Ginobili is “The Demon Blade” (妖刀), which sounds (and is) awesome, but of course in Chinese martial arts fiction, blades possessed by demons, while powerful and devastating to opponents, often have the propensity turn back against their owners at crucial moments.The whole list is fantastic, but I’m particularly fond of the fondness for the Mamba nicknames. Famous basketball man Kobe Bryant nicknamed himself “Black Mamba” after the snakes that he claims “strike with 99% accuracy at maximum speed, in rapid succession.” These mambas are… not that: Eric Gordon is called “Round Face Gordon” (圆脸登) because his face is seemingly a perfect circle. A similar nickname is “Pi Mamba” (π曼巴), suggesting his face is such a perfect circle it can be used to accurately calculate the value of pi. Ryan Anderson is the “Standing Around Mamba” (站曼巴), because people feel he just stands around behind the three-point line, waiting for a catch-and-shoot pass.I could definitely be a Standing Around Mamba, minus the whole “catch the pass” part, or the “shoot the ball” part.",
"content_html": "

At their best, Chinese nicknames always seem to combine both affection and shade, producing monikers that both fans and haters can get behind. Thus Charles Barkley is called a fat pig, but he’s a flying fat pig (飞猪)—high praise, since the character for “flying” normally is reserved for players who take their game above the rim. It’s also a pun, since the character for “flying” sounds similar to the Chinese word for “fat.” Similarly, Joel Embiid is “the Great” (大帝), but there’s a hint of sarcasm that maybe his greatness is self-appointed and not yet earned. Manu Ginobili is “The Demon Blade” (妖刀), which sounds (and is) awesome, but of course in Chinese martial arts fiction, blades possessed by demons, while powerful and devastating to opponents, often have the propensity turn back against their owners at crucial moments.

The whole list is fantastic, but I’m particularly fond of the fondness for the Mamba nicknames. Famous basketball man Kobe Bryant nicknamed himself “Black Mamba” after the snakes that he claims “strike with 99% accuracy at maximum speed, in rapid succession.” These mambas are… not that:

Eric Gordon is called “Round Face Gordon” (圆脸登) because his face is seemingly a perfect circle. A similar nickname is “Pi Mamba” (π曼巴), suggesting his face is such a perfect circle it can be used to accurately calculate the value of pi.

Ryan Anderson is the “Standing Around Mamba” (站曼巴), because people feel he just stands around behind the three-point line, waiting for a catch-and-shoot pass.

I could definitely be a Standing Around Mamba, minus the whole “catch the pass” part, or the “shoot the ball” part.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/stories-behind-chinas-best-nba-nicknames/",
"date_published": "2018-05-15T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-05-15T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/welcome-blog-ipsa-loquitur/",
"title": "Welcome to Blog Ipsa Loquitur",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "A little administrative housekeeping: I’ve renamed this blog from Barely Legally to Blog Ipsa Loquitur and moved it to a new domain. You don’t need to update your bookmarks or do anything different, because every URL at barelylegally.com should (should!) redirect seamlessly to the equivalent URL here at blog.ipsaloquitur.org.I come not to praise Barely Legally, but to bury it; the name Barely Legally had a good run. Longtime readers will recall this blog spent its first few years named Almost Legally while I was a law student opining about the law. It only became Barely Legally when I became a newly minted lawyer opining about the law. But I graduated and passed the bar exam in 2010, and that’s long ago enough that I don’t think I’m barely a lawyer any more.Honestly, I’m not going to miss the Barely Legally name much. It was only ever a sequel to Almost Legally, which amused me because it seemed like a blithe way to describe something illegal. Barely Legally neatly pointed out that I didn’t have a lot of experience, but the “funniest” part was how closely it resembled the name of a genre of adult films; what it lacked in wit, it made up for in screaming “don’t read this blog on your work computer at lunch.”In addition to a name and domain change, I’ve updated the design of the site: the sidebar’s gone, the scales of justice are no longer 8-bit, and a couple things got cleaned up. No design update would be complete without a gratuitous refresh of the typography. Blog Ipsa Loquitur is set in Freight Text, and everything else is in Ministry.Watch this space for further updates in 2034.",
"content_html": "

A little administrative housekeeping: I’ve renamed this blog from Barely Legally to Blog Ipsa Loquitur and moved it to a new domain. You don’t need to update your bookmarks or do anything different, because every URL at barelylegally.com should (should!) redirect seamlessly to the equivalent URL here at blog.ipsaloquitur.org.

I come not to praise Barely Legally, but to bury it; the name Barely Legally had a good run. Longtime readers will recall this blog spent its first few years named Almost Legally while I was a law student opining about the law. It only became Barely Legally when I became a newly minted lawyer opining about the law. But I graduated and passed the bar exam in 2010, and that’s long ago enough that I don’t think I’m barely a lawyer any more.

Honestly, I’m not going to miss the Barely Legally name much. It was only ever a sequel to Almost Legally, which amused me because it seemed like a blithe way to describe something illegal. Barely Legally neatly pointed out that I didn’t have a lot of experience, but the “funniest” part was how closely it resembled the name of a genre of adult films; what it lacked in wit, it made up for in screaming “don’t read this blog on your work computer at lunch.”

In addition to a name and domain change, I’ve updated the design of the site: the sidebar’s gone, the scales of justice are no longer 8-bit, and a couple things got cleaned up. No design update would be complete without a gratuitous refresh of the typography. Blog Ipsa Loquitur is set in Freight Text, and everything else is in Ministry.

Watch this space for further updates in 2034.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/welcome-blog-ipsa-loquitur/",
"date_published": "2018-05-14T00:00:00-04:00",
"date_modified": "2018-05-14T00:00:00-04:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/emails-echo-chambers/",
"title": "Emails and Echo Chambers",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Lawyers, Guns & Money is one of my favorite blogs because you don’t spend a lot of time wondering what the premises of their posts are. Here’s one that I missed the first time around: The Russian Hacks Were Effective Because of Terrible Reporting Practices. LGM’s Scott Lemieux quotes James Risen’s account of Russian interference in the 2016 election: There can be little doubt now that Russian intelligence officials were behind an effort to hack the DNC’s computers and steal emails and other information from aides to Hillary Clinton as a means of damaging her presidential campaign. Once they stole the correspondence, Russian intelligence officials used cutouts and fronts to launder the emails and get them into the bloodstream of the U.S. press. Russian intelligence also used fake social media accounts and other tools to create a global echo chamber both for stories about the emails and for anti-Clinton lies dressed up to look like news. To their disgrace, editors and reporters at American news organizations greatly enhanced the Russian echo chamber, eagerly writing stories about Clinton and the Democratic Party based on the emails, while showing almost no interest during the presidential campaign in exactly how those emails came to be disclosed and distributed. The Intercept itself has faced such accusations. The hack was a much more important story than the content of the emails themselves, but that story was largely ignored because it was so easy for journalists to write about Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.Do note that The Intercept is the outlet publishing Risen’s story; he’s not randomly calling out one publication. This leads to Lemieux’s broader point: But hacks alone can’t influence elections. Media coverage of hacks can influence elections, and lessons from the 2016 campaign need to be learned: Note that the leaks were released in a very careful strategic fashion, designed to to maximum political damage — for example, during the DNC, or the day of the Billy Bush tapes. This should have caused the media to be extremely skeptical about the way the leaks were framed and very careful not to advance the narratives of people obviously trying to ratfuck the elections. It didn’t — quite the opposite.There’s a fundamental tension of interests here: on the one hand, you have almost a collective action problem. The constant leaking of DNC and Podesta emails went on for months, and every day was a new opportunity to cover an ongoing story for an insatiable public. If the Washington Post (or The Intercept) just decided not to cover any of it, the news is still out there and being covered by everyone else. Really, these email leaks were fundamentally newsworthy—for more reasons than we understood at the time—and it’s the job of the press to report the news. It’s absurd to suggest that the press would just… ignore them. On the other hand, the breathless coverage carried a lot of water for foreign intellligence operators.What Lemieux ultimately suggests is coverage that spends more time examining the motives of the leakers, and less time pretending the emails revealed some material misconduct by the DNC and Podesta.The 2018 midterm elections are just about 240 days away. If the federal government doesn’t take affirmative steps to discourage foreign meddling this time around, it’s easy to imagine there will be a lot of strategically leaked emails in the news. Here’s hoping the press handles the do-over better than in 2016.",
"content_html": "

There can be little doubt now that Russian intelligence officials were behind an effort to hack the DNC’s computers and steal emails and other information from aides to Hillary Clinton as a means of damaging her presidential campaign. Once they stole the correspondence, Russian intelligence officials used cutouts and fronts to launder the emails and get them into the bloodstream of the U.S. press. Russian intelligence also used fake social media accounts and other tools to create a global echo chamber both for stories about the emails and for anti-Clinton lies dressed up to look like news.

To their disgrace, editors and reporters at American news organizations greatly enhanced the Russian echo chamber, eagerly writing stories about Clinton and the Democratic Party based on the emails, while showing almost no interest during the presidential campaign in exactly how those emails came to be disclosed and distributed. The Intercept itself has faced such accusations. The hack was a much more important story than the content of the emails themselves, but that story was largely ignored because it was so easy for journalists to write about Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

Do note that The Intercept is the outlet publishing Risen’s story; he’s not randomly calling out one publication. This leads to Lemieux’s broader point:

But hacks alone can’t influence elections. Media coverage of hacks can influence elections, and lessons from the 2016 campaign need to be learned:

Note that the leaks were released in a very careful strategic fashion, designed to to maximum political damage — for example, during the DNC, or the day of the Billy Bush tapes. This should have caused the media to be extremely skeptical about the way the leaks were framed and very careful not to advance the narratives of people obviously trying to ratfuck the elections. It didn’t — quite the opposite.

There’s a fundamental tension of interests here: on the one hand, you have almost a collective action problem. The constant leaking of DNC and Podesta emails went on for months, and every day was a new opportunity to cover an ongoing story for an insatiable public. If the Washington Post (or The Intercept) just decided not to cover any of it, the news is still out there and being covered by everyone else. Really, these email leaks were fundamentally newsworthy—for more reasons than we understood at the time—and it’s the job of the press to report the news. It’s absurd to suggest that the press would just… ignore them. On the other hand, the breathless coverage carried a lot of water for foreign intellligence operators.

What Lemieux ultimately suggests is coverage that spends more time examining the motives of the leakers, and less time pretending the emails revealed some material misconduct by the DNC and Podesta.

The 2018 midterm elections are just about 240 days away. If the federal government doesn’t take affirmative steps to discourage foreign meddling this time around, it’s easy to imagine there will be a lot of strategically leaked emails in the news. Here’s hoping the press handles the do-over better than in 2016.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/emails-echo-chambers/",
"date_published": "2018-03-09T00:00:00-05:00",
"date_modified": "2018-03-09T00:00:00-05:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/how-trace-gun.markdown/",
"title": "How to Trace a Gun",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "By federal law, there is no real database of guns kept by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. This makes it kind of hard for police to figure out whose gun they just found at a crime scene. Jeanne Marie Laskas in GQ wrote the definitive profile of the unbelievable story of How the Cops Actually Trace a Gun. It’s impossible to summarize, but let’s start at the beginning, with a hypothetical murder scene: So, take that murder we began with. Blood all over the place, cops looking for clues, the booties. They find the gun! What happens next does not involve the wizardry of some supercomputer somewhere. It hinges on a phone call. That cop with the gun dangling from his pinkie. He dials the tracing center and describes the gun. This is Step One. Let’s say, for example, he reports that he’s got a 9-mm semi-automatic Beretta 92.​On the other end of that phone is someone like the ATF’s Scott Hester. The problem is that the police aren’t firearms experts, so when a detective finds a Beretta 92 handgun at a crime scene, it might not actually be a Beretta. He’s holding a hefty book, one of his favorite gun encyclopedias, and he would like to tell me about the Beretta 92 and its various doppelgängers. “Now, the real Beretta’s made in Italy,” he says, “but Taurus is made in Brazil. So you have the Beretta 92 and Taurus PT 92. They’re the exact same gun except the safety’s on the slide on one and on the frame of the other.” I want to tell him it doesn’t matter—I was just picking any random gun so he could walk me through the steps about how to trace it—but it occurs to me that his entire career is built on the premise that, yes, it matters. “Now, Beretta was licensing its stuff in Brazil,” he goes on, “but Taurus bought it out, so they bought up Brazil—Beretta’s factory in Brazil—and licensed it as Taurus.” He’s pointing to a page in the book, tapping hard as if the force of the tap will make this any easier to follow.I love that the only person who seems more frustrated by the situation than the ATF agent is the reporter, who just wants to know what happens when an officer calls about a particular gun. The fact that there are absolutely no easy answers is a theme that occurs again and again in this excellently written story. Laskas eventually manages to move the conversation along. What happens when you identify the model of gun? “I need the serial number,” Hester says. He lifts his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug and lets out an ominous sigh. Serial numbers: not so simple. “It gets worse and worse, more and more problematic.” Serial numbers, it turns out, are tangled clogs of hell. Half the time what the cop is reading you is the patent number, not the serial number, or it’s the ID of the importer, and then you have the “zero versus letter O” problem, the “numeral 1 versus letter l versus letter small-cap I” problem, and then there is the matter of all the guns with duplicate serial numbers (various Chinese guns, certain pre-1968 American guns). “Okay?” Hester says, in a pleading sort of way. The number one reason gun traces go dry is because the cop got the gun description or the serial number wrong. I tell him I need to move on. I could never work here. I tell him let’s pretend there’s a miracle and we definitely know we have a Taurus PT 92 and it has a legible serial number. We may now move on to Step Two.Sisyphean seems like an understatement, but incredibly, these people have upwards of a 90% success rate in the face of what ought to be insurmountable obstacles. That particular number comes from a wonderful short documentary on this process. ​",
"content_html": "

By federal law, there is no real database of guns kept by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. This makes it kind of hard for police to figure out whose gun they just found at a crime scene. Jeanne Marie Laskas in GQ wrote the definitive profile of the unbelievable story of How the Cops Actually Trace a Gun. It’s impossible to summarize, but let’s start at the beginning, with a hypothetical murder scene:

So, take that murder we began with. Blood all over the place, cops looking for clues, the booties. They find the gun! What happens next does not involve the wizardry of some supercomputer somewhere. It hinges on a phone call.

That cop with the gun dangling from his pinkie. He dials the tracing center and describes the gun. This is Step One. Let’s say, for example, he reports that he’s got a 9-mm semi-automatic Beretta 92.

​On the other end of that phone is someone like the ATF’s Scott Hester. The problem is that the police aren’t firearms experts, so when a detective finds a Beretta 92 handgun at a crime scene, it might not actually be a Beretta.

He’s holding a hefty book, one of his favorite gun encyclopedias, and he would like to tell me about the Beretta 92 and its various doppelgängers. “Now, the real Beretta’s made in Italy,” he says, “but Taurus is made in Brazil. So you have the Beretta 92 and Taurus PT 92. They’re the exact same gun except the safety’s on the slide on one and on the frame of the other.” I want to tell him it doesn’t matter—I was just picking any random gun so he could walk me through the steps about how to trace it—but it occurs to me that his entire career is built on the premise that, yes, it matters. “Now, Beretta was licensing its stuff in Brazil,” he goes on, “but Taurus bought it out, so they bought up Brazil—Beretta’s factory in Brazil—and licensed it as Taurus.” He’s pointing to a page in the book, tapping hard as if the force of the tap will make this any easier to follow.

I love that the only person who seems more frustrated by the situation than the ATF agent is the reporter, who just wants to know what happens when an officer calls about a particular gun. The fact that there are absolutely no easy answers is a theme that occurs again and again in this excellently written story. Laskas eventually manages to move the conversation along. What happens when you identify the model of gun?

“I need the serial number,” Hester says. He lifts his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug and lets out an ominous sigh.

Serial numbers: not so simple. “It gets worse and worse, more and more problematic.”

Serial numbers, it turns out, are tangled clogs of hell. Half the time what the cop is reading you is the patent number, not the serial number, or it’s the ID of the importer, and then you have the “zero versus letter O” problem, the “numeral 1 versus letter l versus letter small-cap I” problem, and then there is the matter of all the guns with duplicate serial numbers (various Chinese guns, certain pre-1968 American guns).

“Okay?” Hester says, in a pleading sort of way. The number one reason gun traces go dry is because the cop got the gun description or the serial number wrong.

I tell him I need to move on. I could never work here. I tell him let’s pretend there’s a miracle and we definitely know we have a Taurus PT 92 and it has a legible serial number.

We may now move on to Step Two.

Sisyphean seems like an understatement, but incredibly, these people have upwards of a 90% success rate in the face of what ought to be insurmountable obstacles. That particular number comes from a wonderful short documentary on this process. ​

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/how-trace-gun.markdown/",
"date_published": "2018-03-04T00:00:00-05:00",
"date_modified": "2018-03-04T00:00:00-05:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/spotting-fake-news/",
"title": "Spotting Fake News",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Charlie Warzel, for Buzzfeed News, asks a pretty simple question: Why Can Everyone Spot Fake News But The Tech Companies? Warzel begins by discussing the misinformation promoted by Google Search, Facebook, and YouTube in the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting in October 2017. Over the next two days, journalists and misinformation researchers uncovered and tweeted still more examples of fake news and conspiracy theories propagating in the aftermath of the tragedy. The New York Times’ John Herrman found pages of conspiratorial YouTube videos with hundreds of thousands of views, many of them highly ranked in search returns. Cale Weissman at Fast Company noticed that Facebook’s crisis response page was surfacing news stories from alt-right blogs and sites like End Time Headlines rife with false information. I tracked how YouTube’s recommendation engine allows users to stumble down an algorithm-powered conspiracy video rabbit hole. In each instance, the journalists reported their findings to the platforms. And in each instance, the platforms apologized, claimed they were unaware of the content, promised to improve, and removed it.I think that paragraph could just as easily have been written in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, or the Aurora movie theater shooting, or the Sandy Hook shooting, or whatever the next mass shooting will be. Which is kind of Warzel’s point: All of this raises a mind-bendingly simple question that YouTube, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have not yet answered: How is it that the average untrained human can do something that multi-billion dollar technology companies that pride themselves on innovation cannot? And beyond that, why is it that — after multiple national tragedies politicized by malicious hoaxes and misinformation — such a question even needs to be asked? Look, of course Google and Facebook and Twitter can’t monitor all of the content on their platforms posted by their billions of users. Nor does anyone really expect them to. But policing what’s taking off and trending as it relates to the news of the day is another matter. Clearly, it can be done because people are already doing it.Seriously, if a handful of Buzzfeed’s reporters can flag this in near real-time for free, surely Facebook and YouTube can hire a dozen folks to watch stuff trend and flag it.Heck, Facebook used to have exactly that thing. It worked great, except for the part where the conspiracy theorists complained that Facebook unfairly blocked right-wing conspiracy theories from trending.Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, has called this phenomenon the “View From Nowhere”. Rosen coined this term in 2003, when there was no Facebook; it originally applied to things like the New York Times’s coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War. But here, when Facebook fired the team of people meant to keep the Trending Stories algorithm from promoting conspiracy theories, I see the View From Nowhere striking again. Facebook fired its team because its team couldn’t suppress as many left-wing conspiracy theories as right-wing conspiracy theories. That means that either Facebook hired a bunch of liberal ideologues who brought their politics to work every day, or conspiracy theories find more traction in conservative media than liberal media.This isn’t new, either. Toward the end of his first term, President Obama famously predicted the Republican fever would break during his second term. I think a national conversation on this is long overdue. Perhaps we’ll get one after the next set of teen crisis actors stage a school shooting.",
"content_html": "

Charlie Warzel, for Buzzfeed News, asks a pretty simple question: Why Can Everyone Spot Fake News But The Tech Companies? Warzel begins by discussing the misinformation promoted by Google Search, Facebook, and YouTube in the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting in October 2017.

Over the next two days, journalists and misinformation researchers uncovered and tweeted still more examples of fake news and conspiracy theories propagating in the aftermath of the tragedy. The New York Times’ John Herrman found pages of conspiratorial YouTube videos with hundreds of thousands of views, many of them highly ranked in search returns. Cale Weissman at Fast Company noticed that Facebook’s crisis response page was surfacing news stories from alt-right blogs and sites like End Time Headlines rife with false information. I tracked how YouTube’s recommendation engine allows users to stumble down an algorithm-powered conspiracy video rabbit hole. In each instance, the journalists reported their findings to the platforms. And in each instance, the platforms apologized, claimed they were unaware of the content, promised to improve, and removed it.

I think that paragraph could just as easily have been written in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, or the Aurora movie theater shooting, or the Sandy Hook shooting, or whatever the next mass shooting will be. Which is kind of Warzel’s point:

All of this raises a mind-bendingly simple question that YouTube, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have not yet answered: How is it that the average untrained human can do something that multi-billion dollar technology companies that pride themselves on innovation cannot? And beyond that, why is it that — after multiple national tragedies politicized by malicious hoaxes and misinformation — such a question even needs to be asked?

Look, of course Google and Facebook and Twitter can’t monitor all of the content on their platforms posted by their billions of users. Nor does anyone really expect them to. But policing what’s taking off and trending as it relates to the news of the day is another matter. Clearly, it can be done because people are already doing it.

Seriously, if a handful of Buzzfeed’s reporters can flag this in near real-time for free, surely Facebook and YouTube can hire a dozen folks to watch stuff trend and flag it.Heck, Facebook used to have exactly that thing. It worked great, except for the part where the conspiracy theorists complained that Facebook unfairly blocked right-wing conspiracy theories from trending.

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, has called this phenomenon the “View From Nowhere”. Rosen coined this term in 2003, when there was no Facebook; it originally applied to things like the New York Times’s coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War. But here, when Facebook fired the team of people meant to keep the Trending Stories algorithm from promoting conspiracy theories, I see the View From Nowhere striking again. Facebook fired its team because its team couldn’t suppress as many left-wing conspiracy theories as right-wing conspiracy theories. That means that either Facebook hired a bunch of liberal ideologues who brought their politics to work every day, or conspiracy theories find more traction in conservative media than liberal media.

This isn’t new, either. Toward the end of his first term, President Obama famously predicted the Republican fever would break during his second term. I think a national conversation on this is long overdue. Perhaps we’ll get one after the next set of teen crisis actors stage a school shooting.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/spotting-fake-news/",
"date_published": "2018-03-03T00:00:00-05:00",
"date_modified": "2018-03-03T00:00:00-05:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/mueller-trump-college-years/",
"title": "Mueller and Trump, The College Years",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "The Washington Posts’s Marc Fisher and Sari Horwitz published a pair of profiles on two of the people at the center of the biggest political scandal in a generation, titled Mueller and Trump: Born to wealth, raised to lead. Then, sharply different choices.I didn’t know much about Bob Mueller before this (he was on a high school ice hockey team with John F. Kerry?!), and this is a fascinating glimpse into his upbringing and career. For my money, the way Fisher and Horwitz contrast Mueller and Trump even as young men is the most entertaining part of this whole thing. For example, this episode from Trump’s military school tenure as Captain: Promoted to captain of A Company, Trump won respect from some of the other boys, who said they never wanted to disappoint him. Trump introduced them to a world of fun, setting up a tanning salon in his dorm room, bringing beautiful women to campus and leading the baseball team to victory. But other cadets said Trump tried to break boys who didn’t bend to his will. During Trump’s senior year, when one of his sergeants shoved a new cadet against a wall for not standing at attention quickly enough, Trump was relieved of his duty in the barracks, said Lee Ains, the student who was shoved. Trump denied being demoted, saying he was actually moved up. “You don’t get elevated if you partake in hazing,” he told The Post in 2016. He was put in charge of a drill team that would perform in New York City’s Columbus Day Parade.Is immediately followed by a smash cut to Second Lieutenant Bob Mueller’s tour of duty in Vietnam: Mutter’s Ridge was a killing ground, a craggy hellscape in Quang Tri province where the Marines had been fighting for years, setting up and abandoning bases as they tried over and over to assert control of one of the main routes the North Vietnamese used to infiltrate the South. Year after year, the ridge, hard by the demilitarized zone that separated North from South, was the scene of fierce assaults, fleeting victories and fiery retreats. On Dec. 11, 1968, Mueller led a platoon of Marines into an eight-hour battle around an extensive complex of North Vietnamese army bunkers. The enemy hit Mueller’s men with a “heavy volume of small arms, automatic weapons, and grenade launcher fire,” according to a Marine Corps account.I love the editorial contrast here. Apart from noting that Trump applied for and received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, that’s about as far as Fisher and Horwitz explicitly take the comparison. Also worth noting, this profile was published before Trump’s absurd remarks about how he’d personally storm into a school shooting. It’s just a coincidence that this impeachment of his character appeared in the Post around the same time as his macho posturing.",
"content_html": "

I didn’t know much about Bob Mueller before this (he was on a high school ice hockey team with John F. Kerry?!), and this is a fascinating glimpse into his upbringing and career. For my money, the way Fisher and Horwitz contrast Mueller and Trump even as young men is the most entertaining part of this whole thing. For example, this episode from Trump’s military school tenure as Captain:

Promoted to captain of A Company, Trump won respect from some of the other boys, who said they never wanted to disappoint him. Trump introduced them to a world of fun, setting up a tanning salon in his dorm room, bringing beautiful women to campus and leading the baseball team to victory.

But other cadets said Trump tried to break boys who didn’t bend to his will. During Trump’s senior year, when one of his sergeants shoved a new cadet against a wall for not standing at attention quickly enough, Trump was relieved of his duty in the barracks, said Lee Ains, the student who was shoved.

Trump denied being demoted, saying he was actually moved up. “You don’t get elevated if you partake in hazing,” he told The Post in 2016. He was put in charge of a drill team that would perform in New York City’s Columbus Day Parade.

Is immediately followed by a smash cut to Second Lieutenant Bob Mueller’s tour of duty in Vietnam:

Mutter’s Ridge was a killing ground, a craggy hellscape in Quang Tri province where the Marines had been fighting for years, setting up and abandoning bases as they tried over and over to assert control of one of the main routes the North Vietnamese used to infiltrate the South.

Year after year, the ridge, hard by the demilitarized zone that separated North from South, was the scene of fierce assaults, fleeting victories and fiery retreats.

On Dec. 11, 1968, Mueller led a platoon of Marines into an eight-hour battle around an extensive complex of North Vietnamese army bunkers. The enemy hit Mueller’s men with a “heavy volume of small arms, automatic weapons, and grenade launcher fire,” according to a Marine Corps account.

I love the editorial contrast here. Apart from noting that Trump applied for and received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, that’s about as far as Fisher and Horwitz explicitly take the comparison. Also worth noting, this profile was published before Trump’s absurd remarks about how he’d personally storm into a school shooting. It’s just a coincidence that this impeachment of his character appeared in the Post around the same time as his macho posturing.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/mueller-trump-college-years/",
"date_published": "2018-02-27T00:00:00-05:00",
"date_modified": "2018-02-27T00:00:00-05:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/lady-doritos-spherical-cows-democracy/",
"title": "Lady Doritos, Spherical Cows, and Democracy",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "The other day, I posted my 15,000th tweet since I first signed up for Twitter in July 2007. Back then, it was called Twttr, and there were no hashtags or @mentions conventions. The homepage was a live stream of every single tweet, and a loaf of bread cost only a nickel.In the decade since, a lot of things have changed about Twitter. For one, the risk of nuclear war being set off via a tweet has increased enormously. For another, there are a lot more people on Twitter. Bread also costs more. But what really strikes me about social media—Twitter and everything else—is that it seems like the same conversation over and over again. Sure, the conversations are about new things, but isn’t it always the same conversation? Something happens, and you’re either for it or against it, but you’re mad either way because you can’t believe half the country is against it or for it.After this year’s The Super Bowl, The Outline’s Alex Nichols explored the unseemly parentage of some of these conversations in a piece titled Lady Doritos, the patron saint of outrage marketing: These brief ping-pong games of feigned outrage can be entertaining, but they ultimately accomplish nothing. Each side digs in its heels until the discussion becomes a parody of itself. The only appreciable effect of any given micro-controversy is that the phrase in question — whether it be “well-done steak,” “shithole countries,” or “covfefe” — sees a brief uptick in search traffic and appears organically in millions of users’ feeds. This proposition is undoubtedly highly attractive to advertisers, who normally have to fork over $200,000 to get something trending on Twitter. Here’s my theory: corporate marketing departments are setting out to hijack this process, thus accomplishing the same thing — but for free.Set aside the tedium in endless cycles of (genuine, but nonetheless) performative outrage. It’s hard to argue with Nichols’s theory. I mean, I’ve been convinced for a while that Urban Outfitters’s marketing strategy seems to revolve around a bimonthly outrage. This week it was “Lady Doritos.” In an interview on the Freakonomics podcast (which I was upset to learn exists) PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi suggested that the chip division of her company was developing a cleaner, less crunchy Dorito variety aimed at women. As is the internet’s wont, Nooyi’s comments were wildly misconstrued and became a flashpoint for Twitter hysteria. “Lady Doritos” were never actually going to be a real thing, and PepsiCo walked back the suggestion within a day with an incredible tweet: “We already have Doritos for women — they’re called Doritos, and they’re loved by millions.” Truer words were never spoken.Come for the PepsiCo malarkey, stay for Disney’s PR firm making sure everyone knows there’s a pirate version of The Last Jedi with all the women edited out. I really like Nichols’s reporting here.Sidebar: Really, what did the outrage and teeth-gnashing accomplish? It’s bad enough that we had another stupid argument online about Lady Doritos or Daisy Ridley. But a thing that was never going to happen didn’t happen, and a lot of people angrily tweeted in agreement and/or disagreement with one another. I can’t escape the feeling that I’m participating in the Outrage Culture Wars with every tweet. Every 140 characters is a window of opportunity for millions of strangers to angrily shriek their approval or disapproval at the values I’ve signaled. Heck, even the fact that tweets are 280 characters instead of 140 is a chance for people to take sides. Wading through these cesspools wondering how much of the panic has purposefully engineered to sell more corn chips or movie tickets is just… awful.But It Gets WorseOn reflection, having Disney and Pepsi game the system might be one of the better cases. At least they’re only gaslighting you into buying something. The algorithms powering social media seem to prefer hoaxes and conspiracy theories over reality, as the Guardian’s Paul Lewis reported on a software program that catalogs what YouTube’s algorithm shows users: The software [Former YouTube Engineer Guillaume] Chaslot wrote was designed to provide the world’s first window into YouTube’s opaque recommendation engine. The program simulates the behaviour of a user who starts on one video and then follows the chain of recommended videos – much as I did after watching the Logan Paul video – tracking data along the way. Over the last 18 months, Chaslot has used the program to explore bias in YouTube content promoted during the French, British and German elections, global warming and mass shootings, and published his findings on his website, Algotransparency.com. Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial. When his program found a seed videos by the searching the query “who is Michelle Obama?” and then followed the chain of “up next” suggestions, for example, most of the recommended videos said she “is a man”. More than 80% of the YouTube-recommended videos about the pope detected by his program described the Catholic leader as “evil”, “satanic”, or “the anti-Christ”. There were literally millions of videos uploaded to YouTube to satiate the algorithm’s appetite for content claiming the earth is flat. “On YouTube, fiction is outperforming reality,” Chaslot says.On the one hand, YouTube can’t really control what its users upload. That’s one of the big ideas behind social media, right? People make the content, and other people follow channels of content that they like, and media gets democratized. My tweets are on even footing with CBS News: I don’t need a network of radio and television affiliates or a web site.On the other hand, YouTube can control what its users see. There’s something like a hundred hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. There’s literally no way to watch it all. YouTube is going to recommend some videos over others, but I can’t stand networks like YouTube pretending to be passive systems. Even worse, by promoting videos claiming the earth is flat, YouTube is creating an incentive for people to make more flat earth videos.Back to Lewis: [Zeynep] Tufekci, the sociologist who several months ago warned about the impact YouTube may have had on the election, tells me YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content s engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.” Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”​If the cafeteria started serving chocolate-covered deep-fried Lady Doritos, parents (if not teachers) would understandably revolt. Tufecki’s one of the single best writers about this issue you can read. Note that her analogy relies on the duty of care the adults in the room owe the children. The school isn’t a passive system: it’s administered or at the very least regulated by the government to enrich the minds (and bodies) of its students. Unregulated networks like YouTube have no interest other than engagement.Tufekci also asks the deeper question: But why would a bias toward ever more weird or divisive videos benefit one candidate over another? That depends on the candidates. Trump’s campaign was nothing if not weird and divisive. Tufekci points to studies showing that “field of misinformation” largely tilted anti-Clinton before the election. “Fake news providers,” she says, “found that fake anti-Clinton material played much better with the pro-Trump base than did fake anti-Trump material with the pro-Clinton base.”You do have to wonder why one party’s voters seem so much more susceptible to conspiracy theories and hoaxes than the other’s. There’s no left-wing equivalent to Fox News; nobody on MSNBC or CNN has spent the year breathlessly speculating on the Pee Tape the way Fox’s anchors endlessly entertained the idea that President Obama was not an American citizen. I’m not sure if that’s a cause or an effect. To be clear, there are groups of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 who also think President Bush Did 9/11 and so on, but those groups of people aren’t mainstream the way Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Alex Jones are.One Last ThoughtLet me switch gears and come back to that in a second. There’s a famous quote that’s been attributed to just about every boxer since Jack Johnson that goes something like this: “Everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the face.” Any ideology or system of values ought to be able to interact with reality. There’s an old joke about the dangers of overvaluing abstract thinking: Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, “I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum”.​A friend of mine with an education in economics once explained to me why he had little faith in capitalism. As an economic system, capitalism relies upon (1) consumers with perfect information who (2) make perfectly rational decisions and (3) perfectly efficient transactions. But of course, consumers are people, and people don’t even have perfect information about how irrational they are. Consumers likewise don’t have perfect information about what the rest of the economy is doing. Oh, and if you think transactions are perfectly efficient, I have a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who can sell you information on where to buy a bridge.I’m starting to worry that democracy is relying on spherical cows: human beings who live in the same reality. Back when there were three TV networks, and everyone watched the same nightly news reports, that worked more or less okay. But YouTube and Facebook’s algorithms feed us more and more outrageous and appalling content—whether it’s true or not—until we live in parallel universes. And I don’t think there are going to be fewer algorithms feeding us information in the future; there will probably be more.",
"content_html": "

The other day, I posted my 15,000th tweet since I first signed up for Twitter in July 2007. Back then, it was called Twttr, and there were no hashtags or @mentions conventions. The homepage was a live stream of every single tweet, and a loaf of bread cost only a nickel.

In the decade since, a lot of things have changed about Twitter. For one, the risk of nuclear war being set off via a tweet has increased enormously. For another, there are a lot more people on Twitter. Bread also costs more. But what really strikes me about social media—Twitter and everything else—is that it seems like the same conversation over and over again. Sure, the conversations are about new things, but isn’t it always the same conversation? Something happens, and you’re either for it or against it, but you’re mad either way because you can’t believe half the country is against it or for it.

These brief ping-pong games of feigned outrage can be entertaining, but they ultimately accomplish nothing. Each side digs in its heels until the discussion becomes a parody of itself. The only appreciable effect of any given micro-controversy is that the phrase in question — whether it be “well-done steak,” “shithole countries,” or “covfefe” — sees a brief uptick in search traffic and appears organically in millions of users’ feeds. This proposition is undoubtedly highly attractive to advertisers, who normally have to fork over $200,000 to get something trending on Twitter. Here’s my theory: corporate marketing departments are setting out to hijack this process, thus accomplishing the same thing — but for free.

Set aside the tedium in endless cycles of (genuine, but nonetheless) performative outrage. It’s hard to argue with Nichols’s theory. I mean, I’ve been convinced for a while that Urban Outfitters’s marketing strategy seems to revolve around a bimonthly outrage.

This week it was “Lady Doritos.” In an interview on the Freakonomics podcast (which I was upset to learn exists) PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi suggested that the chip division of her company was developing a cleaner, less crunchy Dorito variety aimed at women. As is the internet’s wont, Nooyi’s comments were wildly misconstrued and became a flashpoint for Twitter hysteria. “Lady Doritos” were never actually going to be a real thing, and PepsiCo walked back the suggestion within a day with an incredible tweet: “We already have Doritos for women — they’re called Doritos, and they’re loved by millions.” Truer words were never spoken.

Come for the PepsiCo malarkey, stay for Disney’s PR firm making sure everyone knows there’s a pirate version of The Last Jedi with all the women edited out. I really like Nichols’s reporting here.

Sidebar: Really, what did the outrage and teeth-gnashing accomplish? It’s bad enough that we had another stupid argument online about Lady Doritos or Daisy Ridley. But a thing that was never going to happen didn’t happen, and a lot of people angrily tweeted in agreement and/or disagreement with one another. I can’t escape the feeling that I’m participating in the Outrage Culture Wars with every tweet. Every 140 characters is a window of opportunity for millions of strangers to angrily shriek their approval or disapproval at the values I’ve signaled. Heck, even the fact that tweets are 280 characters instead of 140 is a chance for people to take sides. Wading through these cesspools wondering how much of the panic has purposefully engineered to sell more corn chips or movie tickets is just… awful.

But It Gets Worse

On reflection, having Disney and Pepsi game the system might be one of the better cases. At least they’re only gaslighting you into buying something. The algorithms powering social media seem to prefer hoaxes and conspiracy theories over reality, as the Guardian’s Paul Lewis reported on a software program that catalogs what YouTube’s algorithm shows users:

The software [Former YouTube Engineer Guillaume] Chaslot wrote was designed to provide the world’s first window into YouTube’s opaque recommendation engine. The program simulates the behaviour of a user who starts on one video and then follows the chain of recommended videos – much as I did after watching the Logan Paul video – tracking data along the way.

Over the last 18 months, Chaslot has used the program to explore bias in YouTube content promoted during the French, British and German elections, global warming and mass shootings, and published his findings on his website, Algotransparency.com. Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial.

When his program found a seed videos by the searching the query “who is Michelle Obama?” and then followed the chain of “up next” suggestions, for example, most of the recommended videos said she “is a man”. More than 80% of the YouTube-recommended videos about the pope detected by his program described the Catholic leader as “evil”, “satanic”, or “the anti-Christ”. There were literally millions of videos uploaded to YouTube to satiate the algorithm’s appetite for content claiming the earth is flat. “On YouTube, fiction is outperforming reality,” Chaslot says.

On the one hand, YouTube can’t really control what its users upload. That’s one of the big ideas behind social media, right? People make the content, and other people follow channels of content that they like, and media gets democratized. My tweets are on even footing with CBS News: I don’t need a network of radio and television affiliates or a web site.

On the other hand, YouTube can control what its users see. There’s something like a hundred hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. There’s literally no way to watch it all. YouTube is going to recommend some videos over others, but I can’t stand networks like YouTube pretending to be passive systems. Even worse, by promoting videos claiming the earth is flat, YouTube is creating an incentive for people to make more flat earth videos.

Back to Lewis:

[Zeynep] Tufekci, the sociologist who several months ago warned about the impact YouTube may have had on the election, tells me YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content s engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.”

Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”

​If the cafeteria started serving chocolate-covered deep-fried Lady Doritos, parents (if not teachers) would understandably revolt. Tufecki’s one of the single best writers about this issue you can read. Note that her analogy relies on the duty of care the adults in the room owe the children. The school isn’t a passive system: it’s administered or at the very least regulated by the government to enrich the minds (and bodies) of its students. Unregulated networks like YouTube have no interest other than engagement.

Tufekci also asks the deeper question:

But why would a bias toward ever more weird or divisive videos benefit one candidate over another? That depends on the candidates. Trump’s campaign was nothing if not weird and divisive. Tufekci points to studies showing that “field of misinformation” largely tilted anti-Clinton before the election. “Fake news providers,” she says, “found that fake anti-Clinton material played much better with the pro-Trump base than did fake anti-Trump material with the pro-Clinton base.”

You do have to wonder why one party’s voters seem so much more susceptible to conspiracy theories and hoaxes than the other’s. There’s no left-wing equivalent to Fox News; nobody on MSNBC or CNN has spent the year breathlessly speculating on the Pee Tape the way Fox’s anchors endlessly entertained the idea that President Obama was not an American citizen. I’m not sure if that’s a cause or an effect. To be clear, there are groups of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 who also think President Bush Did 9/11 and so on, but those groups of people aren’t mainstream the way Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Alex Jones are.

One Last Thought

Let me switch gears and come back to that in a second. There’s a famous quote that’s been attributed to just about every boxer since Jack Johnson that goes something like this: “Everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the face.” Any ideology or system of values ought to be able to interact with reality. There’s an old joke about the dangers of overvaluing abstract thinking:

Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, “I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum”.

​A friend of mine with an education in economics once explained to me why he had little faith in capitalism. As an economic system, capitalism relies upon (1) consumers with perfect information who (2) make perfectly rational decisions and (3) perfectly efficient transactions. But of course, consumers are people, and people don’t even have perfect information about how irrational they are. Consumers likewise don’t have perfect information about what the rest of the economy is doing. Oh, and if you think transactions are perfectly efficient, I have a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who can sell you information on where to buy a bridge.

I’m starting to worry that democracy is relying on spherical cows: human beings who live in the same reality. Back when there were three TV networks, and everyone watched the same nightly news reports, that worked more or less okay. But YouTube and Facebook’s algorithms feed us more and more outrageous and appalling content—whether it’s true or not—until we live in parallel universes. And I don’t think there are going to be fewer algorithms feeding us information in the future; there will probably be more.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/lady-doritos-spherical-cows-democracy/",
"date_published": "2018-02-23T18:00:00-05:00",
"date_modified": "2018-02-23T18:00:00-05:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/dog-watch-thyself/",
"title": "Dog, Watch Thyself",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Here’s one from NPR that’s sad but not necessarily surprising. Trump Administration Plans To Defang Consumer Protection Watchdog: The CFPB is considered a powerful and independent watchdog. But many Republicans have wanted to shut it down since day one because they think it’s too powerful. [Acting CFPB Director] Mulvaney is one of them. As a Congressman, Mulvaney called the agency a “sick sad joke.” He drafted legislation to abolish it. So people at the bureau were shocked when the president appointed him to run this consumer protection agency. Within weeks of coming on board, Mulvaney has worked to make the watchdog agency less aggressive. […] In another move that particularly upset some staffers, the new boss also dropped a lawsuit against an alleged online loan shark called Golden Valley Lending. The suit says the lender illegally charges people up to 950 percent interest rates. It took CFPB staffers years to build the case. […] Mulvaney hasn’t officially offered details about why the case was dropped. Meanwhile, staffers at the bureau say they are worried Mulvaney will block more of their efforts to go after shady financial firms. He’s reviewing numerous ongoing lawsuits and investigations.So this guy that runs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau doesn’t like the CFPB, and thinks consumers are already protected well enough. I think companies like Golden Valley shouldn’t be allowed to charge 950% interest. Reasonable minds can disagree, right? Well, this story isn’t as simple as “hey look another market Republicans don’t want to regulate,” although I do continue to be impressed at the breadth of that belief. Rather, the NPR article explains the other shifty things lenders like Golden Valley are doing, and introduces one of the debtors: For her part, Julie Bonenfant of Detroit still hasn’t paid off her debt to Golden Valley. And she feels “betrayed” by the president, whose appointee dropped the lawsuit. “To be honest I’m really mad, really pissed, because I actually voted for Trump,” Bonenfant says. “So knowing that his guy threw out this case that affects people like me. I feel kind of like stupid — just kind of like betrayed.”I do wonder whether these sorts of profiles in buyers’ remorse over the 2016 election are productive or helpful in any way. On the one hand, actions have consequences and if you vote for someone whose policies are going to make your life worse, that’s kind of on you. Trump’s outlandish promises and visible lack of comprehension about just about every issue made him sound like a grifter on the campaign trail.On the other hand, who could have imagined the guy with the gold-plated Manhattan penthouse wouldn’t stand up for the little guy?Ah, crap, that was just the same hand again, wasn’t it?",
"content_html": "

The CFPB is considered a powerful and independent watchdog. But many Republicans have wanted to shut it down since day one because they think it’s too powerful. [Acting CFPB Director] Mulvaney is one of them. As a Congressman, Mulvaney called the agency a “sick sad joke.” He drafted legislation to abolish it. So people at the bureau were shocked when the president appointed him to run this consumer protection agency.

Within weeks of coming on board, Mulvaney has worked to make the watchdog agency less aggressive. […] In another move that particularly upset some staffers, the new boss also dropped a lawsuit against an alleged online loan shark called Golden Valley Lending. The suit says the lender illegally charges people up to 950 percent interest rates. It took CFPB staffers years to build the case. […]

Mulvaney hasn’t officially offered details about why the case was dropped. Meanwhile, staffers at the bureau say they are worried Mulvaney will block more of their efforts to go after shady financial firms. He’s reviewing numerous ongoing lawsuits and investigations.

So this guy that runs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau doesn’t like the CFPB, and thinks consumers are already protected well enough. I think companies like Golden Valley shouldn’t be allowed to charge 950% interest. Reasonable minds can disagree, right? Well, this story isn’t as simple as “hey look another market Republicans don’t want to regulate,” although I do continue to be impressed at the breadth of that belief. Rather, the NPR article explains the other shifty things lenders like Golden Valley are doing, and introduces one of the debtors:

For her part, Julie Bonenfant of Detroit still hasn’t paid off her debt to Golden Valley. And she feels “betrayed” by the president, whose appointee dropped the lawsuit.

“To be honest I’m really mad, really pissed, because I actually voted for Trump,” Bonenfant says. “So knowing that his guy threw out this case that affects people like me. I feel kind of like stupid — just kind of like betrayed.”

I do wonder whether these sorts of profiles in buyers’ remorse over the 2016 election are productive or helpful in any way. On the one hand, actions have consequences and if you vote for someone whose policies are going to make your life worse, that’s kind of on you. Trump’s outlandish promises and visible lack of comprehension about just about every issue made him sound like a grifter on the campaign trail.

On the other hand, who could have imagined the guy with the gold-plated Manhattan penthouse wouldn’t stand up for the little guy?

Ah, crap, that was just the same hand again, wasn’t it?

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/dog-watch-thyself/",
"date_published": "2018-02-15T00:00:00-05:00",
"date_modified": "2018-02-15T00:00:00-05:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/no-business-like-news-business/",
"title": "No Business Like News Business",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "After the 2016 election, one of the ways I dealt with my anxiety was trying to grapple with the extent to which I lived in a news bubble. It was pretty clear that I didn’t understand the world that a lot of other people lived in. A big part of other peoples’ bubble seemed to be Facebook. While I check Facebook maybe three times a year, everyone I know checks it virtually daily. Immediately after the election, there was no shortage of accounts of how Facebook turned itself into a faulty news powerhouse, and I took some notes on my favorites mostly to order my own thoughts.Well, just about a year into the Trump presidency, Facebook is getting itself out of the news business. Charlie Warzel for Buzzfeed: In many ways, Facebook’s planned changes to News Feed are a retreat from the online public square the company helped create. They’re a tacit admission that the company’s great news experiment — which made it one of the most successful publishers in the world — failed. And now Facebook wants to go back to an idealized safe space, free of hyperpartisan pages, misinformation, and fake news. But when you’re home to nearly 2 billion humans, no change is ever simple; Facebook moved fast, broke things, and changed the way that the world produces, consumes, and shares information. And changing course more than a decade into one of the most disruptive social experiments ever might prove more than just a little difficult.So Facebook is adjusting the algorithm to show fewer posts from Pages in favor of more posts from People. I suppose that’s a start, but what happens when People share propaganda from Pages?Warzel continues: While it may cut down incidental exposure to misinformation, the changes could, in some cases, only harden filter bubbles with a steady stream of content from people with similar ideologies. Meanwhile, a retrenchment from News Feed into more walled-off Groups and communities could exacerbate exposure to misinformation. As one platform executive told BuzzFeed News, “the people who end up being chemtrailers or anti-vaxxers do so because of friend and community groups.”According to one of Facebook’s executives, even if conspiracy theorists and agitprop outfits like “End The Fed” and the “George W Bush Did 9/11 Herald-Gazette” aren’t going to get quite as much bang for their advertising buck anymore, you’ll go back to getting your misinformation from your friends. What a horrible, horrible platform.Also, none of this addresses the clickbait ads. While Facebook is far from the only offender here, they’re the biggest and it’s especially ironic that even their mea culpas are accompanied by bullshit: “We take misinformation seriously,” Facebook’s CEO posted Saturday. Right next to two very obvious pieces of misinformation… Note the lying advertisers to the right of his status update? (No, Hugh Hefner [wasn’t] dead, and no, Tiger Woods hasn’t left the PGA forever.) Those ads don’t even lead to news stories. The first one leads to a site selling cures for erectile dysfunction, and the second leads to a site selling testosterone booster. But there’s something even worse about these two advertisers. Both of their web sites are designed to look like actual news sites.Facebook is not up to the task, whether it’s Pages, the overall News Feed, or even its own ads. I can’t help but recall what Rick Webb wrote last year to Facebook about their business: In short, you’ve set foot into being a player in the news media, with zero interest in actually helping the news media, or in the social responsibilities that come with it. Now sure. You share ad revenue. But only popular stories garner ad revenue. You’ve aggravated the fundamental problem with internet news: only the most sensationalist stories generate the revenue. Whether the income came from subscriptions or ad revenue, in the old days, revenue to a paper was revenue to a paper. […] You could have helped fix this on the internet, but you didn’t. You made it worse.What bothers me is not necessarily that Facebook failed, it’s that they so carelessly entered, destroyed, and departed the publisher market. They built something they can’t control to replace something they don’t understand, and they’re blowing it up once the market has adapted to accommodate it for better or worse.",
"content_html": "

After the 2016 election, one of the ways I dealt with my anxiety was trying to grapple with the extent to which I lived in a news bubble. It was pretty clear that I didn’t understand the world that a lot of other people lived in. A big part of other peoples’ bubble seemed to be Facebook. While I check Facebook maybe three times a year, everyone I know checks it virtually daily. Immediately after the election, there was no shortage of accounts of how Facebook turned itself into a faulty news powerhouse, and I took some notes on my favorites mostly to order my own thoughts.

In many ways, Facebook’s planned changes to News Feed are a retreat from the online public square the company helped create. They’re a tacit admission that the company’s great news experiment — which made it one of the most successful publishers in the world — failed. And now Facebook wants to go back to an idealized safe space, free of hyperpartisan pages, misinformation, and fake news. But when you’re home to nearly 2 billion humans, no change is ever simple; Facebook moved fast, broke things, and changed the way that the world produces, consumes, and shares information. And changing course more than a decade into one of the most disruptive social experiments ever might prove more than just a little difficult.

So Facebook is adjusting the algorithm to show fewer posts from Pages in favor of more posts from People. I suppose that’s a start, but what happens when People share propaganda from Pages?

Warzel continues:

While it may cut down incidental exposure to misinformation, the changes could, in some cases, only harden filter bubbles with a steady stream of content from people with similar ideologies. Meanwhile, a retrenchment from News Feed into more walled-off Groups and communities could exacerbate exposure to misinformation. As one platform executive told BuzzFeed News, “the people who end up being chemtrailers or anti-vaxxers do so because of friend and community groups.”

According to one of Facebook’s executives, even if conspiracy theorists and agitprop outfits like “End The Fed” and the “George W Bush Did 9/11 Herald-Gazette” aren’t going to get quite as much bang for their advertising buck anymore, you’ll go back to getting your misinformation from your friends. What a horrible, horrible platform.

“We take misinformation seriously,” Facebook’s CEO posted Saturday. Right next to two very obvious pieces of misinformation… Note the lying advertisers to the right of his status update? (No, Hugh Hefner [wasn’t] dead, and no, Tiger Woods hasn’t left the PGA forever.) Those ads don’t even lead to news stories. The first one leads to a site selling cures for erectile dysfunction, and the second leads to a site selling testosterone booster. But there’s something even worse about these two advertisers. Both of their web sites are designed to look like actual news sites.

Facebook is not up to the task, whether it’s Pages, the overall News Feed, or even its own ads. I can’t help but recall what Rick Webb wrote last year to Facebook about their business:

In short, you’ve set foot into being a player in the news media, with zero interest in actually helping the news media, or in the social responsibilities that come with it. Now sure. You share ad revenue. But only popular stories garner ad revenue. You’ve aggravated the fundamental problem with internet news: only the most sensationalist stories generate the revenue. Whether the income came from subscriptions or ad revenue, in the old days, revenue to a paper was revenue to a paper. […] You could have helped fix this on the internet, but you didn’t. You made it worse.

What bothers me is not necessarily that Facebook failed, it’s that they so carelessly entered, destroyed, and departed the publisher market. They built something they can’t control to replace something they don’t understand, and they’re blowing it up once the market has adapted to accommodate it for better or worse.

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/no-business-like-news-business/",
"date_published": "2018-01-23T06:00:00-05:00",
"date_modified": "2018-01-23T06:00:00-05:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/this-your-brain-drugs/",
"title": "This Is Your Brain On Drugs",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker, reviews Kate Cole-Adams’s new book “Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness,” which—in addition to having a remarkably poetic subtitle—explores a variety of stories and studies on the weird stuff that happens when people go under general anesthesia: In her attempts to understand what going under anesthesia really entails, Cole-Adams encounters what Kate Leslie, an Australian anesthesiologist, calls “spooky little studies”—odd, suggestive, and often unreplicable experiments. In one such study, from 1993, Ian Russell, a British anesthesiologist, ties a tourniquet around the forearms of thirty-two women undergoing major gynecological surgery. He administers his anesthetic cocktail—the hypnotic drug midazolam, along with a painkiller and a muscle relaxant—then, by tightening the tourniquet, prevents the muscle relaxant from entering each woman’s hands and wrist. During surgery, a recorded message plays through headphones in which Russell addresses each patient by name. “If you can hear me, I would like you to open and close the fingers of your right hand,” he says. If the woman moves her hand, Russell lifts one of the earpieces and asks her to squeeze his fingers; if she squeezes, he asks her to do it again if she is in pain. Of the thirty-two patients Russell tested, twenty-three squeezed to suggest they could hear, and twenty squeezed again to say they were in pain. Although Russell was supposed to test sixty patients, he was so unnerved by these results that he ended the trial early. It’s possible, he suggests, that the women were​ conscious and suffering on the operating table. If that’s the case, then general anesthesia might be better described as “general amnesia.” (Afterward, none of the women recalled hearing Russell’s voice or squeezing his hand.)On my very first date with my now-partner, I explained how terrified I was of general anesthesia because I’d heard a handful of stories not unlike this. It’s only right to make sure she knew what kind of neurotic ride she was boarding fairly early on.While I won’t be able to bring myself to read Cole-Adams’s book, this review definitely piques one’s curiosity; just how much do—and don’t— we understand about anesthesia? As one of the doctors interviewed by Cole-Adams explains: we don’t really understand consciousness, so how can we possibly understand what turns it off? If we don’t know how the sun rises, what makes us think we can make it set?​",
"content_html": "

Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker, reviews Kate Cole-Adams’s new book “Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness,” which—in addition to having a remarkably poetic subtitle—explores a variety of stories and studies on the weird stuff that happens when people go under general anesthesia:

In her attempts to understand what going under anesthesia really entails, Cole-Adams encounters what Kate Leslie, an Australian anesthesiologist, calls “spooky little studies”—odd, suggestive, and often unreplicable experiments. In one such study, from 1993, Ian Russell, a British anesthesiologist, ties a tourniquet around the forearms of thirty-two women undergoing major gynecological surgery. He administers his anesthetic cocktail—the hypnotic drug midazolam, along with a painkiller and a muscle relaxant—then, by tightening the tourniquet, prevents the muscle relaxant from entering each woman’s hands and wrist.

During surgery, a recorded message plays through headphones in which Russell addresses each patient by name. “If you can hear me, I would like you to open and close the fingers of your right hand,” he says. If the woman moves her hand, Russell lifts one of the earpieces and asks her to squeeze his fingers; if she squeezes, he asks her to do it again if she is in pain.

Of the thirty-two patients Russell tested, twenty-three squeezed to suggest they could hear, and twenty squeezed again to say they were in pain. Although Russell was supposed to test sixty patients, he was so unnerved by these results that he ended the trial early. It’s possible, he suggests, that the women were​ conscious and suffering on the operating table. If that’s the case, then general anesthesia might be better described as “general amnesia.” (Afterward, none of the women recalled hearing Russell’s voice or squeezing his hand.)

On my very first date with my now-partner, I explained how terrified I was of general anesthesia because I’d heard a handful of stories not unlike this. It’s only right to make sure she knew what kind of neurotic ride she was boarding fairly early on.

While I won’t be able to bring myself to read Cole-Adams’s book, this review definitely piques one’s curiosity; just how much do—and don’t— we understand about anesthesia? As one of the doctors interviewed by Cole-Adams explains: we don’t really understand consciousness, so how can we possibly understand what turns it off? If we don’t know how the sun rises, what makes us think we can make it set?​

",
"url": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/this-your-brain-drugs/",
"date_published": "2018-01-17T15:34:00-05:00",
"date_modified": "2018-01-17T15:34:00-05:00",
"author": {
"name": ""
}
},
{
"id": "http://blog.ipsaloquitur.org/post/bucket-no-bottom/",
"title": "The Bucket with No Bottom",
"summary": null,
"content_text": "From the Washington Post’s Ellen McCarthy, a slice of life piece on one librarian’s life under a growing cloud of student debt. Just your typical story about a young parent with a home and a car and a job and the crushing psychological weight of knowing you’ll make loan payments until you die: Three years ago, when she finished her master’s degree, Sarah’s student loans totaled $60,000. She has paid steadily ever since and now owes $69,000 — more than twice the annual income she earns working as a children’s librarian. “I keep paying,” the 31-year-old says. “But it’s like pouring into a bucket with no bottom.” […] The glimmer of hope Sarah clings to is her enrollment in a public service student loan forgiveness program that would clear her remaining debt if she puts in seven more years of work with the government and continues to make payments on time. But she’s heard horror stories of borrowers being disqualified from the program — which is available to people who work for the government or certain nonprofits after they have paid their loans on time for 10 years — because of a paperwork error. And she’s terrified the program will be quietly eliminated. (President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal did suggest cutting it for new borrowers but would still forgive debts of people currently enrolled.)​Same, Sarah. Same.​",
"content_html": "

From the Washington Post’s Ellen McCarthy, a slice of life piece on one librarian’s life under a growing cloud of student debt. Just your typical story about a young parent with a home and a car and a job and the crushing psychological weight of knowing you’ll make loan payments until you die:

Three years ago, when she finished her master’s degree, Sarah’s student loans totaled $60,000. She has paid steadily ever since and now owes $69,000 — more than twice the annual income she earns working as a children’s librarian.

“I keep paying,” the 31-year-old says. “But it’s like pouring into a bucket with no bottom.” […]

The glimmer of hope Sarah clings to is her enrollment in a public service student loan forgiveness program that would clear her remaining debt if she puts in seven more years of work with the government and continues to make payments on time. But she’s heard horror stories of borrowers being disqualified from the program — which is available to people who work for the government or certain nonprofits after they have paid their loans on time for 10 years — because of a paperwork error. And she’s terrified the program will be quietly eliminated. (President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal did suggest cutting it for new borrowers but would still forgive debts of people currently enrolled.)